Sons of the Suns
by skywalker05
Summary: AU. A decision and a twist of fate cause Han Solo to be raised as a moisture farmer and Luke Skywalker as a smuggler. Vignette 1: Han's burgeoning relationship with Leia disturbs his Tatooine-born girlfriend.
1. Chapter 1

_Author's Note: See also Collections chapter 48 by Silver Sky 1138. _

_1. Luke Skywalker. 19 BBY_

The white corridors of the _Tantive IV _were unsettlingly relaxing. The ambient light and the white background noise of the ship's softly rumbling engines, combined with Jedi relaxation techniques which calmed thoughts with every rhythmic breath, kept Obi-Wan Kenobi separate from the recent horrors. Padme was dead; Anakin was a traitor, as good as dead. Their children needed a home, for the Jedi Temple had been torn out of existence.

The Force whispered to Obi-Wan like the eye of a storm; like Yoda's moss-green eyes. Yoda sat across from Obi-Wan, looking small with his feet tucked close to him on a white couch designed for humans. Beside him, Bail Organa cradled Leia. Luke burbled in a white plastic carrier on the table beside Obi-Wan, his fate undecided.

Obi-Wan said, "I can take him to Tatooine." Already he had chosen the location of his exile.

"No!" Yoda admonished, almost laughing, although his Force sense remained deathly serious. "Give him his father's name on his father's world, would you? To me, foolish this sounds. Connections among _smugglers, _I have. Monitor him you can, but learn he will to protect and temper himself."

A sudden image of an adolescent unsupervised Force user tearing a starship apart with his emotions flashed before Obi-Wan's eyes; not precognition, but fear and extrapolation. "Monitor him? How?"

"No direct communication will you have. But rescued I did, a holocron from the temple. Contains it does stories of the Jedi, and our teachings. Leave it I will with young Luke's guardian, for a time when old enough he is to need it.

"Before leave this place do you, imprint the holocron to you we will. Its Gatekeeper you will become."

Obi-Wan nodded. So to Luke he would be a hologram, an artificial intelligence, as distant as Yoda or Vodo-Siosk Baas and other legends. It was a surprising decision…but he had to admit that it made more sense than hiding Luke on a planet as important and known to Anakin as Tatooine.

But his misgivings were not gone. Yes, Luke was Anakin's son, but he was also an infant, and smugglers were not known for living the safest, most fulfilling lives. Jedi taught that the so-called underworld of the galaxy was not _evil_. Smugglers kept the galactic economy running in their own way, and were people as much as any citizen or Jedi was. However, Jedi worked against the suffering caused by such things as drug- or slave-trafficking, and such people prompted so-called aggressive negotiations far more than Obi-Wan liked. He asked, "Who exactly are your contacts?"

"A Trianii woman named Muurkal, and her family. Once helped me they did to stop a slavery ring. Adopts children, she does, and once find she did a Force-sensitive child. Not your typical smuggler is she," Yoda said, gesturing with one hand to wave away Obi-Wan's unspoken concerns. "More of a…trader running outside Republic trade lanes, is she. Takes she does things from those that have an excess, and gives to those with too little."

"Will I meet her?" Obi-Wan tried to muster a last argument.

Yoda nodded.

**A few minutes **later, Obi-Wan knelt alone beside the tiny, pyramidal holocron between his hands. Its textured, patterned sides, gold and black and tan, looked worn and solid compared to the shimmering floor.

Yoda had told him that all he needed to do was talk to the holocron as if to an older Luke, and to open himself to the Force. His exact words would not be recorded, but his nature would. It was a bit nerve-wracking to be saying something as important as that which would establish his character in Luke's mind, and to be saying it to a small bronze triangle.

He spoke his mind, unable to do more. "I want to say I'm sorry, Luke. I think it's not my fault, that your life will be like this, but…" He paused, touched fingers to his forehead and felt sweat and strands of red-gold hair. "Life, the Force, chose these events, these destinations, for us. But I…I've almost been the Force. I've felt so much, that it feels like there's no justice in being unable to change what happened." He sighed. "We're _Jedi_. We're supposed to be able to do things about events which…leave people like this." He leaned back, wiping away small tears. "We're supposed to be powers. For good. Except sometimes…you'll know the Code, Luke. It's in here too. You'll know what you're not supposed to do. But….it's hard not to do those things, sometimes. I wish I could tell you what happened to your father, exactly…" Here was the one lie, the one precaution, the one specified incident in the flood of vague truths. "what happened in the crash. But I can't. It wouldn't be good for you.

"So." Obi-Wan leaned close again, sure of himself now, because the fateful words had gone from him. "May the Force be with you, Luke."

He cut his Force connection to the holocron. No longer did it watch him. He stood and picked it up, intended to return it to Yoda as he had been told. But then its Gatekeeper appeared, a blue Obi-Wan figure only a handspan tall, with his robes, his face, and his voice, softened and refined slightly in comparison to the tear-combating cracks which had punctuated his speech. This Obi-Wan tilted his head up at the Obi-Wan which held its source. In a voice with his accent, his nuances, with, he realized, his kindness and wry humor, it said, "Hello there."

**Over the quiet **world of Manna Sanders, the _Tantive IV _docked against the pitted side of a freighter slightly smaller than itself. Obi-Wan, Bail, and Yoda stood in front of the hatchway between them, Luke sleeping soundly, warmly, in Obi-Wan's arms.

Sadness left the world crisp.

The door hissed open, revealing a felinoid whose pointed ears folded against the lintel as she ducked to enter the _Tantive_. Her fur was gray striped with black, neatly combed and gathered around her neck into a mane of banded locks. A furred tail waved behind her from underneath the edge of a light green dress which covered her legs to the knees, her body, and one shoulder. Other life-forms were gathered behind her; Obi-Wan caught a glimpse of something brown-furred and shaped similarly to the Trianii, but sporting a pair of wings as wide again as its body. It stood only a few feet tall, and Obi-Wan felt through the Force, to his relief, that like the rest of Muurkal's entourage, it was a child.

Muurkal bowed to Yoda as best she could. Her smiling face, lips closed over fangs and bright green eyes shining with kindness and merriment, still stopped a few feet over his head.

"Thank you, Muurkal," Yoda burbled, bowing his own head with a wide smile on his face. Then he simply looked at Obi-Wan.

The Jedi Master pressed the bundled baby against the Trianii's outstretched hands. Warm fur caressed his forearms like worn clothing. Luke turned toward the furry shoulder Muurkal held him against, burying his face in the stripes, surely breathing in a scent he would grow to love.

_He is going to be safe_, Obi-Wan thought. _He will grow up strong and kind and watched over, while I hide on Tatooine, waiting for a moment in which history can be changed._

He had not yet pictured that future; the wound was too raw for him to imagine either Anakin's death or his return to the light, because to do so would be to stop the denial Obi-Wan was drowning in. But he would go to dry, quiet Tatooine and live, and heal, as Luke would heal in this new home. Fear for the child did almost make him shout at Muurkal, interrogate her, find out the conditions on board the ship with all those children of indeterminate species—but he did not, because Yoda trusted her, and even after everything Obi-Wan still trusted Yoda. He had too little trust left to lose faith in the one remaining great Jedi. He would still lie for Yoda.

Two green hands held out the holocron which dwarfed them, then was swallowed up in Muurkal's palm as she shifted to cradle Luke in the crook of her left arm.


	2. Chapter 2

_Han Solo. 25 BBY _

Han stretched out his hands under the shadow of a skyscraper on Corellia, hunger pains—not so much pains as _distractions_, really, an insistent, bothersome inability to think about anything except food—turning the faces of the passersby into blurs.

_This is his earliest memory. He will always be able to recall the glint off the shiny fingerprints on the grimy panes of glass across the street. He was friendless, homeless except for a tent and a bed in an alley, both made of the same discarded, plaid cloak. He does not know his surname, and nor does he think he has one. Surnames, he knows from listening, are shared between families, while first names are individual. He has no family, and so, no surname to come with it. He does have "Han", and he keeps it close. One day, he knows, he will be able to introduce himself to someone, and they will care that "Han" means him._

_It is his daydream._

The residents of the low streets, Corellians and aliens alike, walked by as if he weren't standing beside them with his thin belly and open hands. Then, suddenly, a purple-decked humanoid form stooped, its identity hidden by a veil, and dropped three credit chips into his hands. He clapped his sweating hands together over them, and, without any response to the charitable being, ran off along the side of the road.

Now to get to food. Now to get to his camp and eat the food. How many credits, anyway? He risked a peek. Three singles. Enough.

An extra shadow darkened the sky above his fringe of brown hair and for a second he flicked his gaze upward, at whatever had eclipsed the sun. Then the world lurched—a crack in the ancient pavement caught his foot and pitched him to the ground. His teeth clicked together and pain flared to life on his elbows and across the left side of his face. He moaned and sat up, gently at first, then desperately as he realized that the credits had been flung from his hand by the fall. He lunged forward on all fours, scanning the dirt-strewn ground with frantically wide eyes—

which widened even further when he saw a woman crouching in front of him, smiling with red lips and blue eyes, holding out the lost chips.

He looked around. She might have an accomplice hiding somewhere, waiting for him to move closer to net-throwing or shooting range. Slavers or pirates stunned and enslaved kids, he'd heard, and some species ate them. No one was visibly pausing on the street or lurking in shadows…

He darted forward, took the chips, and darted away, back a few feet, looking at her because someone this generous was more alien than anything he knew.

She spoke. "It's all right. Do you have parents, little one? Friends?"

He shook his head. "I'm Han."

She stood up, hands still on her knees, black hair falling over her face as she bent almost to his level. She smiled at his name. "I'm Gabria Fin. I run the orphanage on Gakti Street; four levels up, you can get there. Come by some time. I won't take you with me if you're frightened of kidnapping. You can just come by, and we'll feed you, and you don't have to stay and sleep in a bed if you don't want to."

She turned, began to walk away.

He followed the round tracks her heels made in the dirt. When she turned around, he met her eyes and smiled at her smile.

**Han sat on **a couch that smelled nothing like his home, plucking at the bandage stuck to his chin, while Gabria Fin tested the drop of blood she had taken from him. His face had needed cleaning after the fall. The orphanage that Gabria had led him to was probably the oldest building in the city, but had heat and no obviously threatening qualities, so that was fine. Its walls were wooden, doors framed with plastic like in more modern buildings. Gabria was rational about things: Han liked this about her. She was going to make sure that he really didn't have a family who, for whatever reason, had discarded, forgot about, purposely or mistakenly lost, or left him as bait. On the other side of the musty, dark-wood wall he heard her speaking to someone else, a teenage girl who, it seemed, staffed the infirmary.

Han had looked around for other children when he came in, and had seen none. He looked around the dimly-lit waiting room in which he sat now, and still no evidence—but he could hear them, footsteps and whispers from upstairs. Maybe they were going to bed soon.

Something chimed. He heard movement from the other room, and Gabria said, "Solo."

She came from behind the wall and he flinched to sit straight. She smiled. "Han Solo," she said. "That's your name."

He turned it over in his head, like a stone in his hands. It meant little.

She sat down on a couch opposite him, her white jacket pooling around her hips. "The family that this test matched you to…some of them are dead. That explains why you are an orphan. But some are alive. They're not—"

"Gabria?" The girl from the infirmary called. Gabria and Han turned to look at her. She returned the gaze from under a curtain of blonde bangs, nervous. She said nothing, exactly as if she were reminding Gabria of something but did not want Han to know what it was.

He tensed his arms, ready to run.

"It's fine." Gabria replied, reassuring, exactly the opposite of her aide's nervousness. "I believe in telling the truth, so that it does not come as a shock later." She turned back to Han, and said, "The extended portion of the Solo family is a bit odd. I do not think that they are capable of raising a child…safely."

She looked around, as if when the imagined danger came, it would come to the entire city.

She asked, "Do you want to go to them, Han Solo? Or do you want to stay here? I can assure you a home."

He said, "I'll stay," because an imminent home was good. So was the smell of food wafting into the room. "What's that?"

"Baked chvilas." Gabria stood up. "Want some?"

Han nodded.

Like a flood, the children of the orphanage surged toward the smell, feet clattering down the stairway, between the room Han sat in and the foyer. They were of every species, every color, every age between four and seventeen—a Rodian teen carried a Twi'lek baby, both dressed in shapeless but clean brown clothes; two identical humans passed the doorway in a rush; a fat Selonian came down last, its tail dragging and leonine eyes sleepily blinking.

"Dinner," said Gabria, and held out her hand.

Han followed her into the chaos and the heavenly smell.


	3. Chapter 3

III

Ten-year old Luke Skywalker stood in a storage hanger on Muurkal's starship, glancing around at the piles of boxes which filled the large, white-walled room. His best friend Susaa, a winged Kentra and another one of Muurkal's foster children, was lurking around here somewhere...

Luke turned around when he heard the pad of feet.

"Tag!" Susaa leapt out from behind a box in a flash of brown fur and wide wings. His otter-face grinned as he tapped the human on the shoulder and danced away.

Luke lunged for him and his hands caught only air. Susaa's six-foot wingspan scooped the air and propelled him upward. "Come get me!"

Luke clenched his fists. Susaa flapped higher.

And so, Luke ducked into a cave of storage boxes which he had piled up, laboriously, a few days earlier. The plan which he would bring to fruition from within would end Susaa's good-natured but galling taunts.

This hanger was used for storage, not starships, and Muurkal's children had free range of it. They also, Luke discovered, could use whatever equipment was lying around and looking disused. Those who could fly could use the large space to exercise that ability, or those who wanted to run, ran, making the room a sort of gymnasium in space where floor space was usually at a premium.

Luke crouched in the cave he had made and used the dim light to pull the pieces of his creation toward him. Light flaps of metal, plastic straps, and a hydrospanner passed beneath his small hands. A moment later he reached into the guts of the machine, moving a connecting wire here and checking fuel levels there. From outside, mostly muffled, came Susaa's gleeful taunts. As Luke increased the pace of his work he needed no more light; his eyes drifted shut as he worked, sleepy blue under a fringe of blonde hair. Either he knew that a part was placed correctly or incorrectly, and if it was incorrect he moved and rehooked it so that it meshed with the other puzzle-pieces which dimpled the fabric of the universe.

The machine thrummed to life between his hands.

Luke grabbed the homemade jetpack by the straps and dashed out of his fort. He pulled the straps over his shoulders and the machine nestled, slightly uncomfortable for its hardness, against his back. Susaa stopped circling near the ceiling and settled on a pile of crates, wings cupped around him, thumbs hooked arrogantly into the utility belt that was the only clothing he wore.

Luke gripped the left shoulder strap near his collar and pressed a button which was inset there and wired to the machine's ignition.

The rocketpack pushed him upward, hurtling him toward Susaa, propelled by a roaring column of smoke. Smiling, releasing a held breath in a huff, he spread his arms for balance. The floor retreated from him, loosing detail—he couldn't stare at it for long. The ceiling was coming.

Luke's flying feet brushed the crate where Susaa sat. The Kentra backpedaled, fur standing on end. He pressed the button again and the roar cut out, sending him dropping to hands and feet in front of Susaa, grinning. Mere memory of the vertiginous ascent set him to smiling even wider. He lunged forward and patted Susaa on the wrist. "Gotcha!"

Susaa looked flabbergasted, and then gave a fanged smile.

Luke was alerted to Muurkal entering the room a moment before the sound of her stomping feet reached his ears. The two children turned to see her lumber around a pile of boxes into view.

Susaa launched off the tower of crates into the air and dropped to his feet in front of his foster parent. "Luke," Muurkal rumbled, growl in her voice.

The boy carefully, methodically reactivated the jets and rocketed to the ground with a serious expression on his face. "Sorry."

"How did you do this?" The Trianii moved toward him, arms outstretched, but she was more bemused than threatening. "How did you—Well I guess it's my fault, for leaving components like this around." She smiled. "My genius." She turned to Susaa and her joy increased; any jealousy the Kentra might have felt toward Luke was cancelled out by his longstanding closeness to Muurkal. He bested the human in terms of age, although his species grew at a different rate than humans did. "My instigator," Muurkal affectionately titled Susaa, then swung her felinoid head toward Luke. "Does _Ben _know you built this?"

"I don't know."

_That's an interesting answer,_ Muurkal thought. It implied that Luke had not told the holocron of his plan, but suspected that the gatekeeper might know about it anyway. To the best of her knowledge he—Obi-Wan, nicknamed to hide his identity from potential Imperial boarding parties—didn't, but she thought that a little mysticism wouldn't hurt her foster son any.

She asked, "How did you build this?"

"Ben taught me," Luke said brightly.

"How to built a jetpack? I thought he didn't know you were doing this."

"Not how to build this," he replied. "How to…build." He tried to gesture, to indicate a web or swirl.

"All right. Well," When she reached out, Luke lifted his arms to let her take the machine off of his back. "I think running this inside is too dangerous." She waved a finger in front of his widening eyes. "Next time we're planetside, you can try again. Building things could be very useful. However…you two have chores to do."

Luke looked down, the best he could d to imitate the felinoid droop of whiskers and mane. Both children followed Muurkal diligently out of the hanger, Susaa dragging his feet and Luke trooping along emotionlessly. Both, though, visibly cheered up within a few steps, eager to reenter the territory of Muurkal's small pack of children.

No human, Muurkal knew, was supposed to be able to build a working jetpack at the age of ten. To channel the Force into effortless mechanical aptitude was not a conscious power. Luke needed innate talent for it. She ought talk to Ben, she thought, and find out what Luke had been taught so far. Depending on what basic training Luke had, he could prove to be extremely useful in the future.


	4. Chapter 4

IV

For a moment, seven-year old Han Solo had conflicting thoughts about passing the door. He could grab and hold on to it…but he needed to accept the change that was coming. His life would never be the same after this. He wouldn't be one child in the crowded orphanage; he'd be someone's, not one of Gabria's; he'd be able to see a new planet, safer than Corellia.

So he followed Gabria through the door, shyly shuffling his feet and looking up through a fringe of spiky brown hair. The couple sitting on one of the couches within were blonde-haired and wore neatly tailored clothing, his a white tunic and cloak, hers a tan sheath dress with a red neckline of beads. Gabria steered Han to the room's other couch with a hand on his shoulder.

Han had never seen this room before. It held one shuttered window with elegant lintels, the two couches which faced one another, a navy blue rug, and a silver protocol droid. As Han and Gabria came in, the droid offered a tray holding two glasses of water to the couple, and so Han's first look at their eyes showed him surprise and greed as they took the offered liquid.

"This is Mark and Talia Redsun," said Gabria to Han. "They're here from Tatooine. They want to adopt you." She put a placating hand on his back and smiled at the two offworlders, red lips curved in her sincere smile as usual.

"How many years is it going to be before he can work?" Mark Redsun grumbled. His was a lined face held a haggard but not antagonistic expression similar to that which the people Han was used to seeing on the streets of Corellia's poorer distincts often wore.

Gabria replied, "We think he's about seven."

"I can work," Han assured them. The fear of leaving his friends and first home dissipated in the face of real life people who wanted to be his_ parents_, those half-mythical creatures orphans spoke of under their breaths. The realness—the lack of sugar-coating—on these people reassured him. He couldn't recall if he knew where Tatooine was, but it didn't matter. He had a home to tell the others about, and to find on a map of the galaxy. The prospect offered him an unimagined thrill.

"Is his face alright?" asked the woman, Talia. With one hand she brushed at her own chin.

"Be assured that all of our children are healthy and inoculated," Gabria replied. "He just got that scar from falling, a few years back.

Would you three like to be alone for a while?"

"I'll go with them," said Han immediately.

Gabria's kind face smiled in understanding as she looked down at him, hesitant for a moment. Then her demure manner returned. "You'll be part of the Redsun family now. Tatooine is a peaceful planet. You'll be a farmer of a sort we don't have here, harvesting water from clouds.

"Cool," Han replied.

**He said goodbye **to his friends from the orphanage in a cluster of hugs, congratulations, and some tears. Han's belongings had been packed in a plastic case by Gabria and set beside him, ready to board an interplanetary liner. Tentatively he slid out of the group to take Talia's proffered hand. She smiled, and the warmth of that smile was like two suns.

**Han grew tired **of the two suns quickly, just like every other human on Tatooine did. The cool underground room the Redsuns gave him became a refuge, his territory and his place to collapse after a productive day. Over the years he grew tanner and used to farm work. His hair bleached to coffee-colored. He spent his afternoons fixing droids, buying supplies, and driving the dented work speeder to retrieve water tanks and mushrooms from the vaporators, armed with a slug gun in case of attack by Sand People. Mark and Talia were tough and simple, but kind—perfect matches for Han. They did their own share of the same tasks that he did, and with few exceptions the makeshift family was happy.

He discovered underground swoop-bike racing around the age of seventeen.

Han pulled his hat down lower to shade his eyes from the suns as he walked toward his borrowed swoop bike. Baron, one of the friends he had made in Anchorhead, the nearest town to the homestead, called out laughingly as Han mounted, loud enough that the other three racers, Tatooine-born youths all, could hear.

"Don't wreck my bike, Han! I'm counting on you."

Han had time to hear Mehan, Baron's girlfriend, clapping from the rocks which served as viewing stands in the desert before engine roars and hums drowned out any other sound. The referee, a cyborg human probably in the employ of a Hutt, held up a hand, fingers bladed, then dropped it. Han winked at Mehan, but in the next second he had slammed down the accelerator and was too far away for it to matter.

The swoop racers arced around the first turn, sand flying in their wake. The track was a simple circle in the desert flats, without obstacles except for the heat and the other riders—

Han cursed between his teeth for a split second as he tugged his forgotten goggles over his smarting eyes. The bike lurched, but he took control again and accelerated past the next-to-last rider, a Twi'lek with its head-tails wrapped in strips of cloth to protect them from the elements. He risked a glance back as his swoop sped up, and saw the alien's angrily set face.

The Twi'lek was female, and pretty. He hadn't noticed her before, assuming that he knew everyone who mattered in the surrounding townships.

He smiled and accelerated again.

He came in second out of four; the Twi'lek girl was first.

As soon as the bike stopped, a part fell off, something round and important-looking, so that when Fixer picked it up Han dodged behind his acquaintance Biggs and went to congratulate the Twi'lek. She was standing beside her bike talking to an older, human woman. One lekku had come loose of its wrappings, showing pink skin dappled with red.

When the conversation paused, Han caught the racer's eyes and lightly touched her head-tail with his fingers. "You're sunburnt." He said, trying to smile winningly. "If you stop by Tosche Station, just over a few dunes, maybe you can get something for that."

"Maybe I will." She gave a small, dispassionate smile.

He practically skipped back to his friends. He had chores to do at home later this afternoon and a meager amount of prize money to divide between Baron and himself, but with few exceptions, his life was good.


	5. Chapter 5

V

Luke Skywalker knelt before the activated Jedi Holocron, the casing and viscera of a lightsaber lying on the desk before him. Little about him bore the hallmarks of the Knights of years past; black light armor covered his thin form, equipped with blasters, an ascension gun, and sundry equipment. His newest jetpack, matte black and sleek as his armor, stood propped against a wall on the other side of his small bedroom. In his mind was not the Code and the names of masters past, although knowledge of those things resided in his memory. They were rarely in the forefront of his thoughts on the eve of a raid. Rather, he felt a sense of justice and the need for success.

Tonight's mission was a raid against a spice smuggler. Muurkal's crew–some of the children had found other homes through circumstance or choice, but those remaining, like Luke and Susaa, were old enough to participate in the piracy–would steal the drug and sell it back to the smuggler's supplier. It would be off the market for that much longer, fulfilling Muurkal's sense of moral obligation and making a profit as well.

He could think about the mission while his hands did the work of piecing the lightsaber together like a puzzle. Then he concentrated on the mechanisms, when the weapon looked whole. With the Force he tweaked wires inside the silver casting, and set the rare, Illum-born crystal in its socket.

_Snap-hiss-flare–_The blade came to life horizontally before him, humming low and restrained, lime light reflecting off his armor.

He gave a small smile, and Obi-Wan returned it.

**The charges exploded **one after another around the door–flare, spark, flash, until durasteel melted. Cooled air from the spicerunner's ship wafted Luke's hair against his face. He stood against a wall in the umbilical between Muurkal's ship and _Woe Be Gone_, his jetpack pressed against the wall, blaster aimed at the crumbling doorway. Muurkal, Susaa, and near-human Reswa had taken up similar positions, awaiting whatever defenses the spicerunners had.

"_Let's get this over quickly_," Muurkal had cautioned her group. "_Spice, source, space. Casualties are inexcusable." _The Trianii hated how casual death often was among the pirate and smuggler crews she socialized with, and emphasized how important it was that both her crew and their prey survived all encounters. Therefore she emphasized tactics and intimidation as well as pure combat training. She was mother figure and drill sergeant for Luke, and he was her son and her secret weapon.

_Woe Be Gone_'s door crumbled, revealing a short passage and a common room filled with blasterbolts and charging Trandoshan. Muurkal's crewmates pressed themselves against the umbilical's walls, as out of reach as possible from the automated blaster turret in a corner, and a moment later smoke joined the flashes in the air as someone disabled the little gun. The Trandoshan pirate, Luke guessed, was desperate. He was the worst sort of foe, fanatic and manic, awash with predator's instincts and, quite possibly, some of the bravery garnered from the spice the ship carried. Luke could sense four other crewmembers lurking in the main hold behind the Trando, waiting with baited breath and twitching trigger fingers for their companion's suicidal run to provide them with a distraction.

When they fired, Luke triggered his lightsaber. With a snapping sound quickly occluded by the _blat _of blasterbolts being deflected, the neon green blade came to life and sent most of the blasterbolts into the walls around their progenitors. The pirates ducked behind bulkheads and chairs, but not before Luke had time to glimpse a few human heads. The Trandoshan was not so lucky. A diverted shot speared through his leg and he tripped, collapsing like a wrecked speeder between the two groups of spacers. He was even bulkier than most individuals of his species; Luke had to hop over him to move into _Woe Be Gone._

Muurkal and the others followed quickly, laying down blaster fire that drove pockmarks into the decking. When a human head peeked out, a stun ring captured it and knocked the human to the ground with a thud that could be heard in the sudden absence of gunfire.

Slowly, _Woe Be Gone_'s crew stood and put their hands behind their heads.

"We ain't,"said a bearded, brown-haired human, "gonna mess with a Jedi."

Luke sensed another person approaching the room. He looked toward a connecting corridor, but gave no other sign; Muurkal and Susaa moved in front of him to grip the pirates' unresisting hands and push them toward chairs. The Trianii gave Luke a small smile as she passed, but Luke was not entirely paying attention–the pirates were waiting for something. They were cowed, yes, as Muurkal's crew rounded them up, but they had hope that he could sense as an airy sparkle in their thoughts that pushed away fear like sun pushed shadows. Uneasy, he did not deactivate his lightsaber.

As soon as all the pirates–four; two humans and a pair of Nikto–were seated and watched over by someone from Muurkal's crew, Muurkal herself turned to the task of picking the stunned Trandoshan up by the armpits and hauling him up to sit against a wall, grayish nictating membranes flicking over his eyes and showing how disoriented he was. But at the very moment when they seemed most helpless, the pirates' hope glimmered strong.

Luke stepped toward a bulkhead, out of sight of the corridor heading farther unto the pirate's ship, and whistled through his teeth for Muurkal's attention. Someone was running down this corridor. Someone _invisible._

He saw it briefly when it stormed into the room–glints of light like paint spattters washed off of glimpses of fur. The creature barreled into the room, clearly intent on surprising the invaders and saving its crew members.

Luke flung out a bladed hand and caught the creature on the chest as it rushed through the doorway. With a strangled cry it fell to the floor, and he could see more of it now–weasel-like but humanoid, a creature of a different light spectrum, as evidenced by its patchy outlines and the orange goggles around its canid head. A Defel–

"Jedi'll bring us more money than the spice!" the Defel cried to try to rally the others--

Luke thrust out a hand and slammed the creature against the far wall, dislodging from its clawed hand a silver blaster as long as its arm. It wanted to wriggle and lash out, but Luke followed it to the ground and sunk his lightsaber to the hilt in the wall next to its face.

It stilled, fear replacing and softening the anger in its thoughts.

Luke said, "Hello, captain."

**They tied the **Defel up too. With the exception of a few lunges toward escape after the captain, apparently also their secret weapon, had gone limp with fear, the other pirates had cooperated too. Muurkal stood in front of the seated Trandoshan and looked down on it with one furry hand on her round hip.

"Who'd you get the spice from?" Muurkal asked as Susaa and Reswa carried crates of the drug through the umbilical between the two ships.

"Don't tell her!" the Defel snapped. "He'll punish us for getting boarded."

Luke looked at the captain and he shut up.

"He won't be able to if you don't go back to him," Muurkal said kindly, as if her forcing the spicerunners to abandon their source of income was as easy as a teacher putting a schoolyard bully in a corner for shoving.

The Trandoshan hesitated, ground its teeth, glanced at serious-faced Luke, and said "Jabba the Hutt."

Muurkal simply nodded. "Thank you."

Luke heard the Defel's footclaws scratching against the decking, but it did not make a move or speak a word. The young Jedi knew that he needed to keep a straight face, but he could not help feeling a little bemused about how frightened the pirates were of him. They had no more tricks–their hope had died. He certainly wasn't upset that they hadn't put up more of a fight, but–the ability to look at someone and see them wither was _interesting_. How far could he go with it? What about a lightsaber, what about Force powers, made him feel so _untouchable?_

_Power_, he realized, _makes one want to laugh._

_I could take over this ship. Set up my own business, challenge the Empire if I needed too–_he felt that strong.

_But I would loose my family._

_So I will not._

He and Muurkal left the pirates trussed after their cargo was raided, and they backed onto their own ship only when their crewmates were safely across.


	6. Chapter 6

_Brief A/N: Dialogue that you recognize from a certain famous movie (or novelization, actually) doesn't belong to me._

* * *

**VI**

The Star Destroyer had engulfed the _Tantive IV w_ith all the silent majesty of inexorable tractor beams, drawing it up into a hold larger than a spaceport dock. But a few minutes later, as the Star Destroyer floated seemingly alone over the bronze sphere of Tatooine, a tiny part of the prize was rescinded.

The escape pod fell away, lifeless, and the Imperials let it go.

**Twenty-nine-year old Han **Solo's life was comfortable. In a season, the plans and business arrangements would be finished, and part of the his adoptive parents' moisture farm would be annexed off for his own use. It had taken a longer time than he would have liked, in the slow economy of Tatooine, but he was already financially secure because of, and garnered a needed change of scene from, his current job as hired hand for a local couple, Owen and Beru Lars. Han was going steady with Leeta, the Twi'lek swoop racer, but was not without marriage and/or other amorous offers from various local human females, and was hoping to settle down with a human eventually. He would have told anyone who asked that, despite the time of flux his life was taking him through, he was happy.

Even though he was trudging through the sand toward the Lars homestead, carrying a jug of water under one arm and his blaster rifle under the other. The blasted harvester droid had broken down again, but he could not think of a place where he would be happier. His life was more stable here than it could ever have been on dimly remembered Corellia, and he appreciated that.

Sweat dripped precariously near his eyes as he laboriously set the water container down at the edge of the Lars homestead's central pit. Owen was negotiating with a Jawa convoy over some new droids, he saw; maybe this time they would replace the harvester instead of taking it into Anchorhead to be repaired. As he prepared to get a new grip on the container of water, Beru Lars called up to him, one hand shading her face.

"Han—oh, Han!"

"Yes, Missus Lars?"

"Please tell Owen that if he buys a translator to be sure it speaks Bocce."

He couldn't imagine why that would be important—he couldn't recall the Lars' ever knowing someone who spoke only the spacer's language—but he was not privy to their home life and assumed that there must be a reason. "The harvester's shot," he said exasperatedly, gesturing at the water.

"Alright, I'll get that."

Han turned and jogged across the packed sand toward the line of droids which were standing by a looming sandcrawler and guarded by brown-swathed Jawas. The aliens' dusty cloaks obscured everything about the little traders' bodies except their bright-glowing eyes and the fact that none of them was much taller than a ten-year old human. Owen Lars, grizzled and sharp-eyed, ceased his pacing in front of a humanoid protocol droid and began to speak to it.

"Vaprators!" the droid was saying in an officious voice as Han approached. "Why, my first assignment was in programming binary load-lifters…"

Quietly Han passed on Beru's message, and Owen cut the enthusiastic droid off mid-prattle. "Do you speak Bocce?"

"Of course," the droid replied. "It's like a second language to me. I—"

Owen ignored the protocol droid and spoke to the Jawas. "All right, all right, I'll take this one. And that one, the red one." He gestured to a red-capped astromech, as suitable for repairing harvester droids if necessary as it would be for repairing starships.

"Come on," Han gestured to the astromech and, after a few jerky false starts, it rolled after him. The humanoid tottered after it, and in a rough line the three progressed toward the homestead garage where Han, having finished what water harvesting he could do, would ready them for instructions and tasks.

A minute later, an unsettlingly loud click echoed inside the astromech and it lurched to a halt. Steam gushed upward from its vents. Han ducked and inspected it for a moment. Of course—this was a common fault of old and salvaged droids. "Blast it." He raised his voice. "Mister Lars, this droid's got a bad motivator."

Owen immediately rounded on the Jawas. "What are you trying to pull?" A chorus of high-pitched denials and frantic hand-waves burst from the Jawas.

Han felt a touch on his shoulder and looked over to see the protocol droid, one metallic hand demurely outstretched. "Pardon me, sir," it said, "but that Artoo unit over there is a real bargain."

"Mister Lars?" Han called. "Howabout that one?"

The Jawas reluctantly agreed to Owen's trade, the faulty astromech for the newer-looking blue-capped one, which zipped with alacrity to the protocol droid's side.

**Luke Skywalker could **almost feel his hair bleaching as he walked. The suns beat down with a vengeance on Tatooine, as if the ground itself had incurred their endless wrath. The young pirate walked the streets of Mos Eisley, the only town within tens of klicks that had a spaceport, with his head down and his lightsaber near to hand. That was how one needed to be, in a place like this, out on the fringes where the Empire did not have enough resources to truck criminals offworld to a prison planet. So the scum either stayed, or got killed, most often by other scum.

Luke could _feel _the grittiness in the mien of the place. It tainted the Force with greed, with cruelty, with muddled minds and callous ones.

He had never been alone in a place like this before, so far from any of his crewmates. Certainly Muurkal had taken him to various planets over the course of his young life, acclimating him to life outside the ship, but this was his first solo mission—to contact Jabba the Hutt, directly or through an agent, and sell him back his spice. There was a new dimension to Luke's attitude now too, after the raid on the Defel spicerunner; he knew that the Force could be used to protect himself or to get someone to do what he wanted, and so with him he carried that invisible weapon, confidence. A swagger and a lightness had come to his steps, even slightly cowed as he was, as if he were equipped with a jetpack and ready at any moment to live up to his surname. He was dressed like any backwater spacer—synthleather boots, dark pants that were almost formfitting, a loose white shirt under a brown vest. An equipment belt with blaster, lightsaber, and sundries hung low around his narrow hips. He could have been anyone.

And yet, some world-wise and tough beings, their instinctive danger senses piqued, shied away from contact with his blue eyes.

**The protocol droid**, C-3PO, uttered a passing imitation of a sigh as he was lowered into the oil bath in the Lars garage. Han knelt on the riveted floor in the middle of the room, digging grit out of the Artoo unit's vents. The grit fell to the floor with soft clicks, black grains instead of the tan sand that Han had been expecting.

"Huh," he said, and decided to ask the protocol droid about it—it wasn't often that he had someone to talk to at work, farming droids not being known for their eloquence. Han had a feeling that C-3PO's eloquence was going to be so much as to get annoying rather quickly. "There's carbon scoring in here. Were you in a battle or somethin'?"

"Oh, yes sir. Sometimes I'm surprised that we're in as good shape as we are, what with the Rebellion and all."

Although the Redsuns kept up with current events in the galaxy better than most Tatooine citizens did, news was slow to reach the edge of the Dune Sea. Han turned partly around, abandoning the astromech, R2-D2, for the moment. "_You _were in the Rebellion?"

"In a way, sir. We're refugees, of a sort."

"You've been in battles and all that?"

"Several battles, yes, but I'm afraid there isn't much to say. I'm just an interpreter, and not very good at telling stories."

Pity. But Han resumed his scraping, wondering how best to tell Leeta about these droids and make it sound interesting. He pried at a dark grain that was stuck next to Artoo's control panel that resisted the metal edge of his pick.

A flash sent him stumbling backwards, his eyes obscured by blue light. When he steadied himself and blinked the glow away he saw a hologram projected from Artoo, a triangle of light which became the miniature figure of—

Of a human woman whose pale, unblemished skin and clear, confidant voice were as captivating as salt water was to a parched Ishi Tib. Leeta was wiped from Han's thoughts from a moment—then returned, with a very disapproving expression on her pale pink face.

The woman spoke, over and over again hands clasped imploringly: "Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope!"

"Obi-Wan Kenobi?" Han muttered. "Hmph. What's this?" Artoo beeped, nothing that Han could understand. He looked at 3PO for clarification.

"What is that?" the protocol droid berated Artoo. "He asked you a question."

Artoo gave the same unintelligible beeps.

"I'm not sure who she is," 3PO said, head cocked to give a very passable impression of a perplexed human face. "She might have been a passenger on our last voyage. From what I recall, she was a personage of some importance." He lifted his head to remonstrate some more. "Master Han is our master now. Trust him!"

Artoo produced a stream of whistles and blats to which Han listened as intently as if he could understand. If something were wrong with this droid, Owen would _not _be happy with those Jawas. And how could they have stolen or salvaged it from the Rebellion? Maybe this was all crossed circuits…except that Han recognized the name 'Kenobi'.

3PO translated, "He says that he belongs to one 'Obi-Wan Kenobi', a resident of these parts. The fragment of a message that we're hearing seems to be a private message for that person."

"Maybe he means Ben Kenobi. He's an old hermit, comes around to trade and stuff, usually gets run off the farm. But I doubt he's ever owned a droid or heard of the Rebellion. Can't we get more of this message?"

Again, C-3PO translated for R2-D2. "He says that there's a restraining bolt that's circuiting out his self-motivation circuits. Perhaps if you remove it, he might be able to play the entire message."

"Sure…" Han wrenched his gaze away from the woman, where it had drifted of its own accord, and worked the astromech's restraining bolt free of its chassis. Instantly the holo disappeared. "Hey," Han exclaimed, lightly hitting the droid on the dome. "Bring her back. Play the entire message."

Artoo emitted a rude-sounding blat.

"Master Han, he says, 'What message?' "Again his seemingly immobile gaze switched perceptively to the smaller droid. "What do you mean, 'what message'? The one you're hauling around in your rust-ridden innards."

Han sighed and glanced at the chrono on the wall. The green numbers reminded him that it was almost the Lars' dinner time, and therefore time for him to get home to his own. He stood up and looked dourly at the two droids. "See what information you can get out of him," he muttered to C-3PO, then set his pick on the proper shelf and departed the garage, clattering across the gantry on his way to the homestead proper and then his speeder and home.

* * *

_I realized while writing this that I really have no idea why the Lars' would need a droid that speaks Bocce. Any suggestions?_


	7. Chapter 7

**VII**

Stefan Cavimie, second most powerful Imperial officer in Mos Eisley, snuck through an alley with his Wookiee slave in tow. The Wookiee was carrying the money.

Sneaking, in broad Tatooine daylight, entailed walking along like you owned the place. A tan cloak was flung over the Wookiee's shoulder; Stefan had worn it at Jabba's palace to conceal what he now flaunted; his gray Imperial uniform with its epaulettes. No one would stop him here; the Imperials were respected, or, at least, feared, in Mos Eisley. And anyone who didn't fear legal repercussion would certainly fear the Wookiee, who, if he put down the suitcase he was carrying, was able to rip the arms off of almost anything.

That suitcase, containing thousands of credits, was what Jabba had traded Stefan for his confiscated spice. Such trades were quite the lucrative side business, especially on a planet as far away from watching eyes as Tatooine. The only person who could possibly frown upon Stefan's dealings was the highest-ranking Imperial on this planet, who had too much local crime to deal with to notice.

When a figure appeared, silhouetted by the brighter sunshine outside the alley, Stefan ignored it and continued walking straight ahead. But when they passed one another in the alley and walked on—Stefan could now see that the man was a spacer, no cleaner or less heavily armed than any of them—the man spoke to him in a soft, clear voice.

"You're doing something you don't want your superiors to see."

Stefan took a few steps before surprise halted him. He jerked around to look at the spacer, whose back was still turned. But he looked back, as if feeling Stefan's eyes on him, and the Imperial saw a surprisingly youthful face. "What are you talking about?" Stefan growled.

The spacer was deadpan, almost sleepy looking, his blue eyes crystalline in the sunlight. "What do you have in that case?"

"Go away, scum," said Stefan, wary of theft.

"Does the Wookiee like carrying your supplies?"

"Chewbacca," said Stefan primly. "Show this blasted rogue the error of his ways."

The Wookiee gently handed Stefan the package and the cape and lurched toward the spacer, his gigantic furred hands raised, growling deep in this throat. Very few beings stood and faced Chewbacca to see what he could actually do with those hands.

This spacer stood his ground. "He sounds sad," he said, and ducked under the Wookiee's arms.

A moment later Stefan saw the spacer standing in front of him, both hands held palm out, and he must have _thrown _something, because Stefan found himself against the wall of the alley with the feeling that his suitcase had bruised his sternum. The spacer stood in front of him looking down gravely as he slowly aimed a blaster at Stefan's face. Chewbacca slowly rounded on the man, but the spacer fixed the Wookiee with a solid stare and murmured, "Don't you want to be free?"

The Wookiee stilled. Stefan wanted to lash out, but the blaster's muzzle was looming between his eyes.

"You're going to answer a few questions," said the spacer, returning his gaze to Stefan. "Do you know the location of Jabba the Hutt?"

Answering questions plainly was the only thing Stefan could conceive of doing. "He's got a townhouse here, but he's usually out in the desert, at the palace."

The spacer's left hand slipped into one of his belt pouches and retrieved a datapad, which he offered to Stefan. "Write down directions."

Stefan complied.

"If I wanted to trade spice with him, do you know what I would need to do?"

"Yes."

"Tell me."

"There's a side door. Take it. The password is _bantha_ _with a broken back_. The guard will ask you if you saw anything interesting on the way in—that's the answer. Then you'll be set up with his buyers."

The spacer nodded, and Stefan felt an emotion he had not known in a long time—pleasure at having done something correctly that he was told to do. "What's in the suitcase?"

"Credits."

The spacer cast a lingering look at it that Stefan found inexplicably upsetting, but then simply said, "You no longer own Chewbacca."

"I no longer own Chewbacca."

"You don't remember this encounter."

"I…what?"

The alley was deserted. Stefan Cavimie clutched his case of credits to his chest protectively and hurried down the alley toward his home.

**Han should never **have let those droids talk him into removing R2-D2's restraining bolt. Droids weren't supposed to be as willing to talk about themselves as C-3PO had been. Maybe they were rogue droids…

Whatever they were, they had gotten Han into a situation he would really rather not be in. He had found R2 and ended its crazy quest for Obi-Wan Kenobi, but now there were banthas tethered between him and the Lars farm—which meant that there must be Sand People around, who would likely try to kill any human who had entered their territory.

Han adjusted his macrobinoculars and prepared to crawl forward across the sand-scoured rock surface of the hill he was laying on to see whether he could use a pass to the left to get around the banthas. Something dark eclipsed his vision, and he knew in an instant what it was—one of the Sand People, raiders and warriors all with no one better to prey on than human farms who had encroached on the Dune Sea just 'too far'. Quickly he released the binocs and stood, feeling them strike his sternum as they swung from the strap around his neck.

The Sand Person—Han had no idea whether it was male or female, young or old—raised its gaffi stick and prepared to spear him.

Han rolled to the side, seeing the metal weapon thunk into the ground next to him. He caught it and pulled himself to his feet, and for a moment there was a pulling match on top of the hill, its audience the droids below. Then Han's balance failed him. He tumbled down the hill. His rifle smacked against his shoulder blades and was knocked off the crude holster that held it across his back, coming to a stop at the bottom of the hill at roughly the same time as, but three meters away from, Han himself.

Han cursed, and struggled to his feet, angrily watching the Sand Person run toward him at an alarming rate—

A resonant sound echoed through the hills, and the Sand Person stopped, hands tight around its gaffi stick.

A moment later, it, and the other Sand People that had been pawing at Han's speeder, ran off toward the banthas.

Han imagined that his meant he really did not want to face whatever had made that sound. "Get in the speeder," he ordered the droids, only afterward seeing that one of C-3PO's arms had been ripped from its socket and was lying on the ground, wires of every color trailing from its end, a meter away from the droid, who had been knocked onto his back. Han bent to lift R2-D2 out of the alcove it had backed into and into the blue speeder which, although it was a fine SoroSuub model that had cost Han a few years of work, was already dented and scoured gray on the edges from the hardships of working in the desert.

Before Han could make another move, the originator of the sound appeared between two spires of rock; a humanoid wearing a brown cloak with a peaked hood. It waved its arms like a mad being, and approached at a steady, fast walk. Han could only stare in confusion as the cowled creature lurched down the slope. It was standing beside him sooner than he expected, and it looked down at R2-D2. He could see now that it was an old man inside the coarse cloak, a human whose skin was as rough and weathered as sandpaper. His blue eyes, though, were clear and steady.

"Hello there, "he called cheerfully to R2. "Come here, my little friend. No need to be afraid."

"Hey, who are you?" Han snapped. "I'm taking care of the droid." Artoo wheeled forward to stand in the old man's shadow.

With long, tanned hands the man gently lifted his cloak from around his head, revealing white hair and a short beard which had before looked like it could have been part of the cloak.

"Ben Kenobi," Han realized.

"The Jundland Wastes are not to be traveled lightly," Kenobi said, straightening up as R2 rolled out into the sunlight. "Tell me, young man, what brings you out this far?"

Ben Kenobi had a reputation for being insane, not dangerous, but even so Han carefully watched the man in relation to the droids and his speeder while he walked across the defile to retrieve his rifle. "That little droid ran away. He was purchased fairly, but he says he belongs to somebody called Obi-Wan Kenobi."

Kenobi sat down on an out-jut of rock, and it was as if energy had drained from his frame, but also as if he had been renewed by memories; a wistful smile touched his cheeks. "Obi-Wan Kenobi. _Obi-Wan,_" he said slowly. Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long time. A long time."

"He's a real person?" Han picked up his rifle and inspected it for sand.

"Oh yes, he's real."

"You know him? The Lars' found his lost droid, but they're going to want him to pay them for it—"

"He's me," said Kenobi. "I haven't gone by the name Obi-Wan since…oh, just after the Clone Wars."

"So what's the deal with your droid?" Han growled.

"I don't seem to remember owning a droid." Kenobi seemed to think for a moment, and then looked up. "We shouldn't stay here. Sand People are easily startled, but they'll back, and in greater numbers. You have a speeder—might I ask for a ride in the direction of Mos Eisley?"

_Mos Eisley!_ Han thought. _We're not anywhere near there_—then, "You've never owned this droid, but you know what the message it has is about, don't you? Who are you, exactly?"

"I suspect." Ben—Obi-Wan—looked at Han with a gaze which was very, very sane. "And…I was a general, once."

Han nodded reluctantly. Talk of the message had reminded him of the beautiful girl, and despite himself he wanted to learn more about who she was.

He allowed Kenobi to sit in his speeder and also managed to get the worrying, wounded C-3PO and now-complacent R2-D2 returned to their places on the back deck. Han took the pilot's seat and accelerated out of the defile, past where the banthas had been, just as he heard more guttural Sand People cries rising into the air behind him.

**A dark shape **on the horizon became a scene of carnage as the speeder drew closer; Han could see Jawa bodies lying like discarded cloaks around a smoldering sandcrawler. "Whoah," Han breathed, but would have accelerated past, toward Anchorhead, where perhaps Kenobi could get another ride to Mos Eisley.

But the old man said "Stop," and Han complied, drawn by curiosity despite the morbid scene.

Kenobi got out and walked across the sand around the bodies, until deep in the shadow of the sandcrawler, he looked up and inspected its treads. He muttered something, and then called to Han. "We should stop here for a moment. We can relieve R2-D2 of its message."

Han shut the speeder off, saw that Artoo got to the ground, and joined Kenobi in the macabre shadow. Kenobi looked around, then asked, "Did you, or your benefactors, purchase these droids from Jawas?"

"Yeah, they did."

Kenobi sighed. Then he knelt down to R2-D2 and began closing some panels and opening others. He murmured, "Let's see what you are, then."

"I saw part of it," Han said, but was interrupted.

"I seem to have found it."

Again the blue-tinted hologram streamed out from the droid. This time, the woman implored with different words. "General Obi-Wan Kenobi. You served my father in the Clone Wars. Now, he begs you to help him in his struggle against the Empire. I regret that I am unable to prevent my father's request in person, but my ship has fallen under attack. My mission to bring you to Alderaan has failed. I have placed information vital to the survival of the Rebellion into the memory systems of this R2 unit. My father will know how to retrieve it. You must see this droid safely delivered to him on Alderaan. This is our most desperate hour. Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You are my only hope."

There was silence for a time, because Kenobi was thinking, and Han was staring at the Alderaanian woman.

Kenobi's voice broke into his funk. "She is Princess Leia, and she is as embroiled in the Rebel Alliance as anyone can be."

Han wrenched his gaze to Kenobi. "You know some _important _people, old man?"

"I did once."

"So the droid has stuff the Empire wants, but it ended up down here with the Jawas and with Owen and Beru…but that means the Empire might know it went to the homestead next! They might get _arrested_, because of you."

"It might be worse than that," Kenobi muttered.

"What do you—the Empire wouldn't kill people, not like Jawas."

"I need to get to Alderaan. Will you help me?"

"Yeah. But first…I'm going to see what's going on at the farm."

Because he had the unsettling feeling that Kenobi's refusal to answer the question about killing was the equivalent to an emphatic _yes_, and he wasn't going to stand by while anything happened to his neighbors…or to his biweekly paycheck.

**Except that he **_was _going to stand by, because there were six or so Imperials and one of him, plus one Ben Kenobi, who had suggested they stop a dune away from the Imps and watch what was happening.

Owen and Beru stood close together in front of their gome, his arm around her shoulders, confronting a group of armed stormtroopers. The group was too far away for words to be heard, but Han saw immediately when blaster rifles came out. He readied his own. It was little better than a slugthrower—no stun setting—

That didn't matter when one of the stormtroopers turned a _flamethrower _on the homestead. Fire caught on the insulation surrounding the door.

"No—" Han cried, disbelief and anger—he lowered the rifle's sights to his eyes and loosed a shot in the stormtroopers' direction. It hit short of the mark and did no more than turn sand into glass—and catch the attention of the troopers. A white-armored hand waved, and two of the troopers began jogging toward the dune.

Han had no choice—and had a sudden urge to see those troopers explode.

He stood up and, screaming with rage, charged toward the troopers, firing with as much surety as he had when shooting womp rats off the swoop track. Kenobi's cry of "Wait!" went utterly unheeded. Two troopers fell. Four more turned toward him.

That urge to harm the troopers turned into a more powerful urge to keep himself alive.

The other troopers fired, sending spears of coherent light careening toward him like a storm. But a second later, a blur of brown heralded the arrival of Kenobi. The old man held a sword of blue light that deflected the blaster bolts back toward their progenitors. Two more troopers fell. Another two shot Owen and Beru and, as the moisture farmers fell, ran toward their speeders.

Kenobi _jumped_. In an eyeblink he was at the two Imperial speeders. The sky-colored sword sliced through the speeders' steering vanes and then, in the same smooth movement, bisected the stormtroopers. Han was left staring. Kenobi walked back to him slowly, head bowed, weapon out of sight, after touching Beru's and Owen's throats.

Han stared as he returned. Obi-Wan stood close to him and looked down from under the shadows of his hood. "The life force has left them."

"Vape it!" Han cursed. "How could—you—" The words were disparate. He wanted to cry, and did not want to.

Kenobi put a hand on his shoulder. "Now you see why the Rebellion is essential."

Han sat down. The only way he could think was by speaking. "You're…a Jedi. And the Empire. If Beru had had _children…_orphans."

"Or dead. The emperor is ruthless, Han. I must go to Alderaan to oppose him."

"Or _orphans._

I'll take you to Mos Eisley."


	8. Chapter 8

**VIII **

Han barely noticed what Ben Kenobi would later call a Jedi mind trick; he was too busy looking at Mos Eisley. He knew a handful of swoop racers from this town, men who considered Tosche Station the preferable mechanics' shop and Mos Eisley the preferable social scene; Han both understood and doubted that sentiment now. People thronged the streets of the large town, but they were a disreputable-looking sort, as dusty as and less wholesome than the moisture farmers that Han was used to.

He had been to Mos Eisley before, for the thrill it brought in his teenage years, but a combination of his need to work for a living and the fact that there just wasn't much to do there kept him away later. His memory had dulled over the many years of focus on the water and the sand.

Hooded faces bent away from the suns, Jawas wrestled with rontos twenty times taller than themselves, speeders paused at crowded intersections, kicking up dust. As Han noticed that Kenobi's business with the Imperial checkpoint guards had been completed, he pressed his foot down on the accelerator with a bit more of a jolt than necessary; his fear that Artoo-Deetoo would be discovered to be a fugitive of sorts had returned.

The checkpoint receded, traffic moving slower as the speeder entered the town's heart. Han glanced at Kenobi. He quietly said, "How'd we get past those troops?"

Kenobi replied, "The Force can have a strong influence on the weak-minded." And Han, remembering an azure lightsaber and a jump that was almost a flight, thought that it would not do to further interrogate the old man.

Han leaned into the rush of hot air to look around the dusty windshield for the profile of a low-roofed building, the cantina, where they could likely find transport off planet, as long as a spacer was reasonable enough, and credit-poor enough, to want to give it to them. Fading paint on the flowstone walls announced the building as Chalmun's Cantina. Han had visited once or twice with friends and found it a place interesting enough to teenagers who had just attained enough seasons to drink, but rather ratty and focused on events off-world, enough so that it became quickly uninteresting.

Han pulled in beside it, scattering a gaggle of debris-hunting Jawas. He helped the nervous-looking fugitive droids out of the speeder and glared at the Jawas who were tentatively creeping back.

Kenobi muttered, "Most of the best freighter pilots can be found here. But watch your step; this place can be a little rough."

Han replied, "Don't worry. I've been here before."

The cantina's cool, dim interior reminded him of the crowds who squeezed themselves into Tosche Station or the little Anchorhead bar after a swoop race. The losers slumped over strong drinks, and the winners moved in groups of babbling friends. The occasional pair sat alone at a booth. The off-world styles of clothing and live music were the most noticeable differences between the two locales.

Han did not feel nervous. Not until he saw the droid detector on the wall just before the cantina proper, blue sunburst lights scanning anyone who entered for life-signs. The owner of the business did not want seats being filled by beings that would never drink.

Han touched Kenobi's shoulder. "We'll have to leave the droids."

The old man looked over at Threepio. "You'll have to wait outside by the speeder."

The droids were in the process of shuffling and rolling off when Han grumbled, surprised, "What if the troopers notice them out there?"

Kenobi was nonplussed. "We will not be here long."

They descended the steps into the musty crowd, and drifted apart.

**Obi-Wan Kenobi followed **shining lines of the Force into the depths of the bar. Oh, this was unexpected. What Force-user alive would happen upon him here in his exile? The feel was not of a dark assassin…

The Force had changed his life—again—by bringing the droids and the young man into it.

He stilled his rushing thoughts. First to find a ship. _Then _a new destiny.

**Han knew how** toblend in. He leaned against the pock-marked bar and ordered a Corellian Spiced Ale from a fleshy human. The alcohol arrived a moment later, pale amber and pungent.

A moment later, a thick finger violently poked his shoulder. He looked to his left and saw a bulb-eyed alien babbling angrily at him, it's language one he had no understanding of. Then a human, barely recognizable as such because of his whiskered face and deeply scarred nose and cheek, looked around the alien's shoulder and growled, "He doesn't like you."

Han did not want to get into a pointless bar fight. He glared, attempting to convey the fact that this argument was very much not worth his time.

The deformed human said, "_I _don't like you either."

The two shifted as if preparing to attack him. Han moved his drink aside, muttering. "I don't like you either…" _Maybe they bet against me on a swoop race once. Should I have brought my _rifle_?_

The disfigured human lunged, reaching for Han's shoulders, trying to push him off his stool.

Han punched the human in the face. He reeled back, and the alien, half off his stool already, fell noisily against the people and furniture behind him. Han backed up, hands raised, as the two disgruntled beings disentangled themselves and lurched forward, hands dipping menacingly into their pockets.

Kenobi's voice from just behind Han cut through the background babble and struck toward Han's antagonists like a blasterbolt. "This young one isn't worth your time," he said. "Let me buy you something…"

Han glanced behind him. Kenobi stood there, the hilt of his weapon held obviously in one hand, alongside a wall-groomed, tan-furred alien whose soft expression was offset by its menacing appearance; triangular ears that were dipping back against its long-muzzled skill, and its muscled shoulders hunched as furred wings rose from its back.

The beings who had been accosting Han gave him stares hot as coals, but either Han or his new backup had spooked them, and so they slunk away through a dark archway, into a room off of the main bar.

Han relaxed, and looked at Kenobi.

The old man sighed for a moment, and then said, "Susaa here is first mate on a ship that might suit our needs."

**The spacer sat **in an overhung booth, comfortably slouched with his longs legs stretched out in front of him. He wore a vest over a white tunic and dark pants, nothing unusual. Blue eyes looked out of a face that was both angular and surprisingly youthful. There was an air of quiet, effortless confidence around this one that clung to him just as grime clung to most of the other patrons of the cantina. Beside him sat a brown Wookiee, and Han wondered why such an exotic creature was here…and how it could stand all the heat in its fur. It looked up as a woman approached the table where the spacer sat, and a glance from it was enough to send her scurrying away.

The pilot's voice carried clearly over the boisterous background music."I am Luke Skywalker, captain of the _Rogue's Fate. _Susaa here tells me that you're looking for passage to the Alderaan system."

"Yes, indeed," Kenobi replied, "if it's a fast ship."

"It…" Skywalker paused and looked up at Kenobi with an expression of surprise as livid as if the old man had pushed a blaster's muzzle against the spacer's forehead. Han had caught no exchange at all between the two except for the words, but suddenly silence seemed to have cloying weight, and to settle between them like carbonite sealing itself in a mold. They seemed to recognize one another, and to have once been enemies.

But the moment passed, so that Han thought he might have imagined it. Luke Skywalker settled back in his seat, lazy like a lizard in the sun. "All of you need to go to Alderaan?"

"Myself, my companion, two droids, and _no questions asked."_

Skywalker was unfazed by that declaration. "Local entanglements?"

Ben replied, "Let's just say that we want to avoid any _Imperial _involvement."

_This man could betray us, _Han realized. _Unless, perhaps, we pay him enough. _"How much will we owe you for this trip?" He asked.

Skywalker hesitated. Kenobi began to speak, but the spacer said, "Eight thousand, once we get to Alderaan, subject to change if the mission gets…complicated."

"Eight thousand!" Han protested.

"You have a deal," said Kenobi, and Han wondered where _he _got his credits.

Hirsute Susaa—_was it,_ Han wondered, _normal for spacers to travel with groups of large aliens? Perhaps it was—_raised his ears and looked toward the bar behind Kenobi. "Looks like somebody's started to take an interest in our passengers," he said.

Armed and armored Imperial stormtroopers, their white uniforms vividly visible across the crowded bar, were bending to hear the bartender's words, but Han didn't need to hear to understand; he was being pointed at. Either someone had figured out that the droids were stolen, or the barfight had been more of a big deal than he thought, or the troopers had realized that Kenobi had done his Jedi-thing on them—where were the droids, anyway? A pair of stormtroopers weaved through the crowd toward him, their blasters dark and obvious with their black straps, and he had a distinct urge to get back to his home as quickly and directly as possible.

Except that Kenobi had said _myself and my companion. _

Han backpedaled. "No thank you. I said I'd get you to Mos Eisley, old man, and now here we are. I'm going back to my life."

"They've seen you by now," Kenobi said, infuriatingly calm. "You're wanted either way."

Skywalker stood up. The Wookiee raised himself to his imposing full height and moved aside for the spacer, who approached Kenobi. _He's a lot skinnier than I am, _Han thought. _I could just hit him and say 'here, here's your man, and let Kenobi get away._

But did he really want to aid the Empire, to aid the beings who had _killed _Owen and Beru?

And did he really have any time to make that decision?

Ben's hand was on his shoulder, Susaa's wings filling up his field of vision as the alien walked into a crowded alcove and gestured for Kenobi to follow. Han let himself be caught up in their wake.

**The stormtroopers found** Luke Skywalker alone. Chewbacca lurked in an alcove a few meters away, his Force sense frightened, and with good reason—it was likely that these troops had gotten their superiors' report about a missing slave.

They had gotten _nothing _about the _two _Jedi a blastershot away…

The appearance of the old man with a Force sense as bright as twin suns had sent Luke, sun-blind, reeling toward the shade of logic. Of course there were other Force-users in the universe. Master Kenobi and Master Yoda from the holocron had always said that it would be impossible for the Empire to wipe out all of them, but that it was their _organization _which had been crippled—and, perhaps, judging from the hints of regret in the phantom voices, by not only the Empire, but by itself as well. The Force was pervasive, and so he should not be surprised to find that he was not the only ichthyoid in the ocean.

But this man, this aged receptacle of what felt to Luke's psychic self like the nuclear fission inside a sun, was no latent Jedi. He _used _what he had, like but different from how Luke used it.

He knew how to drown in power, and how to breathe it.

The stormtroopers arrayed themselves in front of Luke for a moment and looked down at him, then walked away, seeing nothing but another spacer.

"**Wait." Han protested. **He dug his heels in and glared at the back of Kenobi's rough-hewn cloak as the two men, Susaa, and R2-D2 and C-3PO hurried from the cantina to the spaceport, keeping to back alleys that ruined the farmer's sense of direction. "I can't be involved in this. I have a _job _to do—" But stormtroopers, who must have been lurking outside the cantina waiting for their squad-mates to flush the prey out into the open, suddenly filled the mouth of the alley behind them. A blasterbolt shrieked over Han's head and buried itself a nearby wall, leaving him shaken.

Kenobi did not slow down. "The Imperials know you have the droids now, Han."

_You go with them_, Han realized, chiding himself, _or you stay here and _stay here i_n the dirt because you'll be _dead_. _

Susaa jumped out of the group, wings tucked against his back. He crouched against the wall and flung one arm out in front of him, squeezing the trigger of a blaster. He looked back at Kenobi and said, as the shots from the stormtroopers lessoned as Susaa's thinned their ranks, "Go on ahead! Docking bay 94."

The four hurried on ahead into a hallway, and Han glimpsed a sleek, almost beaked starship with three engine nacelles ringing it like fins that filled up the round room beyond a door marked '94'. He hurried through. For a moment he was stunned by the size of the ship, used as he was to seeing them only airborne and at a distance. But then the figure of Luke Skywalker appeared on the ship's ramp. "Hurry," he called, and Han jogged forward, wary—Skywalker was staring past him as if the spacer could see the stormtroopers battling his friend.

**Susaa holstered his **blaster, jumped into the air, and pumped his wings furiously to rise out of the alley and gain a vantage point of the area. The second group of stormtroopers, the ones from the cantina, were at the mouth of the alley, some glancing down it and starting when they saw the bodies of their allies, most focused on the brief dialogue between their captain and a hooded Kubaz.

Susaa flew over the roofs that connected the alley to the warren of inter-spaceport passageways, and landed in the dirt outside the _Rogue's Fate_. He trotted up the ramp, following the protocol droid they were taking to Alderaan, which nodded at Luke and said "Hello, sir," before tottering to safety inside the ship. Susaa smiled at Luke and paused beside him before glancing at the doorway, where more troopers were gathering, readying their blasters.

The Kentra muttered, "Should we stick around and fight them?"

Luke answered after a moment. "No. Time to go."

No sooner had the two entered the ship and sealed the door behind them than the man dressed in white stepped into view and confronted them, his voice raised. "Look, I need to get out of here. I wasn't supposed to go to Alderaan."

"The stormtroopers will kill you if you leave now," Luke said casually, moving past the other human on his way to the cockpit.

"But I have nothing to do with this!"

"You do now."

"Maybe we can return you later," Susaa said to the farmer, "but he's right. We've gotta lift off! As it is they might have a tracking device on us already."

"I don't care if they vape this ship, I've got a family out there—"

Luke whirled, one hand raised. The farmer's back hit the wall as if he had been slammed backwards by the throat, although Luke was a meter away. Susaa almost shivered.

Luke said, "_I _care about this ship, and the Empire wouldn't care if you were a Kushiban with a litter of seventeen, they'd _shoot you anyway. _Keep quiet. We'll deal with your passage back later."

The spacer disappeared into the cockpit, and the farmer was left pale and quiet. Then he looked at Susaa with fire in his eyes, and stomped after Luke, resigned and angry.


	9. Chapter 9

**IX**

A firefly-flock of sparks was shorn from the strut beside the viewport as a green Imperial laser lanced too close to the _Rogue's Fate. _Luke glanced at the tac screen. A Star Destroyer lurked in the distance, releasing part of its brood of TIE fighters so that the blips multiplied by the second.

"Set a course for Alderaan," Luke said to Susaa, who busied himself at the navicomputer.

The old man (the one with the light of the Force in him, the one who made Luke realize that all he had ever seen of it was a glimmer, and here beside him was a _sun_) standing behind him clutched at the pilot's chair as Luke swung the ship sideways and dove away from the deluge of TIEs, off the plane of Tatooine's orbit. Luke itched to spin the ship—dialed the inertial dampener up in preparation—but knew that even with the ship's inner gravity unchanging, his passengers from Tatooine might not be ready for the sight of the stars whirling around them. The younger man (Luke would be sure to get their names as soon as possible, if only to crosscheck their identities with those of any wanted criminals, but also to find out more about the Force-user--) and Chewbacca had remained in the common room, behind the cockpit, not desiring to see their planet drop away beneath their gazes.

A trio of TIEs followed the _Rogue's Fate_, spitting lasers into the night-dark that flew askew to either side of their target's twisting path. The _Fate_ was a sleek ship, a DaceHawk supply craft for small businesses, which at its best could serve as a comfortable home for up to five people and could fight or dodge nearly any foe. It had been modified since Muurkal had helped Luke buy it; he had both reinforced and expanded the viewport, so that in the foreword-set pilot's chair one had a panoramic view of space, a strong contrast to the close passage behind the cockpit, which was lit as with stars as with multicolored status lights.

A green indicator glowed to life on Luke's right, notifying him that hyperspace coordinates had been set and they were free of Tatooine's gravity well. Luke stretched his fingers over the proper levers and pulled. Hyperspace engulfed the ship.

When he was sure that everything was secure and running properly, Luke climbed out of his seat and stood up. "We don't need to worry about the Empire anymore."

Susaa half-turned around in his seat to lean his furry forearms on the back of his chair. He lowered his ears at the older man. "Or are we? You seem awfully important to them, for a human and his ward going to a pacifist planet."

The old man sighed and folded his arms. "That is correct." He paused, for effect but perhaps also to denote secrecy, and Luke thought that it was a frightening confidence that allowed him to tell a man a secret in complete security, knowing that he could always kill that man if need be. "The Artoo unit now with us is carrying information important to the Rebel Alliance."

Luke's surprise and general unwillingness to get involved in the war must have shown on his face. (While he considered the Rebels much nobler than the Empire, Muurkal had never considered joining it, and he had caught her independence.)

"I don't mean to cause you trouble, of course," the man continued. "But it wasn't chance that brought us together, Luke. I fought beside your father in the Clone Wars."

"I think you've got the wrong barve," Luke replied, incredulous. "My father never fought—he was a navigator on a space freighter. Look, who _are _you exactly?"

A sad smile accompanied his words. "My name was Ben Kenobi. I was a Jedi Knight, once…like your father."

"Ben Kenobi—any relation to Obi-Wan Kenobi?"

Another cryptic laugh. "I used the name Obi-Wan, before the dark times."

His father, a Jedi? Luke stared into the hyperspace tunnel to avoid the ignominy of looking down at his feet, realizing as he never had before that they could be _falling _into it, clinging to the side of the ship, as much as they could be hurtling forward according to synthetic gravity. It would explain—he almost should have known. Perhaps the Force was inheritable, not or not only randomly granted.

Muurkal had always said very little about Luke's parents, except that Anakin had been a spacer, and Luke's mother, while Muurkal did not know her name, a noble senator. Luke had always cast them both as pilots in the stories he told himself—it was more exciting that way. The little else which Muukal had told him about his family was that Obi-Wan, the Jedi from the holocron (who couldn't have been more than forty at the time of the device's keying to him) was not his father, although the two had blurred together in his mind some times.

Luke owed the Force—and by extension everything he had ever built—to Anakin, but also to Obi-Wan.

He looked up and measured the old man's face against the more youthful one he had almost memorized from the holocron. This new identity required a rearranging of Luke's thoughts, about the Clone Wars and about himself, but he wanted _answers _first, true identities of the people and droids now inhabiting his ship. "So you're a Jedi."

"I trained your father in the Jedi arts, until Darth Vader betrayed and murdered him."

Vader—fist of the Empire. Another rearrangement. Luke struggled to continue his line of questioning. "How are you involved with the Rebellion? And one of the droids is an agent of it—what about the other human?"

"Han is a moisture-farmer; a victim of circumstance, some might say. But I sense that he may be very important to our fate.

"The Artoo unit was sent to me by the princess of Alderaan, to take to her father. Both are leaders of the Rebel Alliance. We simply need to deliver the droids to Alderaan."

"I'm bound to that," Luke sighed. Alderaan would hand him his credits, if no one else did. That was not his problem. The fact that this was a crux—Kenobi could teach him the Force, which would surely take longer than the voyage, or Luke could go on as he had, alone save Susaa—was.

What was wrong with learning—except that the Empire collectively would then glare more fiercely at him? Muurkal had not loved the Empire, and neither had Luke, but they had simply skirted it. He did not want to draw attention to himself, and especially not to Susaa or Muurkal, who had nothing to do with the Force.

But he had Kenobi's holocron in his cabin. He often used it to discuss the Force—its gatekeeper rarely lectured, but simply talked to Luke about whatever he wished, and metamorphosed those subjects into lessons somehow. Luke admired Kenobi's knowledge, and feared it (but was also thrilled by—it implied so much _life_). He supposed that the gatekeeper was his mentor.

He never liked the phrase 'father figure'. Although it appeared in talk and holos, he didn't know what it was supposed to mean. He had imagined adventures for his father, but Anakin was dead, where Kenobi could still be alive, if he ever had been. And so he, not Anakin, received Luke's loyalty.

And to find out that Kenobi _was_ alive, albeit looking rather unlike his younger self, and that he had been Anakin's teacher, as well as Darth Vader's, made an even stronger emotional tie. It warred only with Luke's lists of proposed missions for Muurkal, and for his own fledgling business. He had hoped to sell Jabba his own spice back a few more times.

These thoughts passed behind his eyes in a flash. Then Luke said, "So you're fighting the Empire to fight Darth Vader."

"To fight the dark side," Obi-Wan said after a weighty pause. "The Emperor uses it too."

Susaa spoke up; Luke had almost forgotten that he was there. "Wait. The Emperor is Force-sensitive and he's hidden that from the whole galaxy?"

"Conveniently enough, it was only the Jedi before the Purge who knew he was living two lives, one as a Sith Lord."

Luke asked, "What's a Sith Lord? I never learned much about the dark side."

"That's hard to believe," Susaa said, looking at and replying to Kenobi. "Why would the Emperor be a Force user? We don't have Force-sensitive assassins running around at his behest. This isn't a theocracy."

"Or is it?" Obi-Wan replied.

"Sounds like a conspiracy theory."

"I need some time to think," Luke said abruptly. He glanced over the computer array, stood, and made for the door.

"We need to speak further," Obi-Wan said. "You are not yet a Jedi."

"I never said I wanted to be a Jedi." But the thought wormed up into his thoughts, extricating itself from a tangle of new information—_Darth Vader killed my father_.

"Nevertheless," and there was something knowing in his mien, like _you will see the reason to join me yet. _"I'd like to know what you have learned about the Force so far."

Luke nodded, and departed, heading for his cabin to sort out his thoughts.

**Han Solo looked **awkwardly at the Wookiee sitting across the common room from him. He had never seen one of the big humanoids before, but they were one of the more striking alien species—everyone had heard of them. Han had never really thought about the fact that they didn't speak Basic before.

The Wookiee made a whuffing sound.

Han looked up and watched it shuffle over to a game board and sit down. The clumsy, furry fingers found the activation button and pressed it, and holographic animals blossomed to life on the alternating squares. Dejarik—Han had played at Leeta's a few times.

The Wookiee looked at him and bobbed its head.

"You want me to play?"

A snuffle, like _Duh, and I'll likely beat you too._

Han laughed and took the seat opposite him. They played without trying to talk.


	10. Chapter 10

**X**

"Well, Luke", Ben Kenobi asked cheerfully, lowering himself into a chair in the _Rogue's Fate_'s common room, "What do you know about the Force?"

Han watched Luke pace the room, his voice soft but tension writ in all the lines of his body. He was too thin to look strong, but that voice could command attention. "I know mindtricks. I'm a good pilot and a good fighter because of it, know a little telekinesis."

"A little?" Kenobi's eyes sparkled, and Han was oddly reassured by how the old man seemed to think that the crazy powers they were talking about were something to make light of, something in which you could receive grades like at school.

Then a cup was in Luke's hand where it had not been before, and it took Han a moment to realize that it had once sat by the food prep unit a meter or two away from both he and Luke. He blinked, but when he opened his eyes the cup had not disappeared from Luke's grasp.

He glanced at Chewbacca. Unless he was reading the Wookiee's expression entirely incorrectly–which was quite possible–Han was the _only _one on the ship who looked skeptical. Maybe a few rounds of dejarik and an attempt to learn Chewie's language weren't nearly enough to sound the depths of him.

_Maybe_, Han thought, _I've simply gone crazy._

He had missed some words between Skywalker and Kenobi, but he couldn't miss when Luke screamed.

It was choked back, and the smuggler held up a hand to prevent Susaa from coming closer to help him, but the other hand was splayed across his armored stomach, and Kenobi looked pale and haunted.

Han put his foot down on an uneven deckplate and almost fell in his attempt to move closer to the old man. "What–what happened?"

Ben spoke in little more than a whisper. "I felt a great disturbance in the Force...as if millions of voices cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened." He rubbed at his forehead, looking down at the floor as if into an abyss. A klaxon started from the direction of the cockpit, a high, insistent beep that brought Luke out of his trance. He shook his head and narrowed his eyes.

"I felt it too.

"We've arrived at Alderaan."

They had arrived at its remains.

**With everyone gathered** behind him in the cockpit, Luke wrenched the ship aside to avoid an asteroid twice its size. "I can't believe it", he said. But gravitic remnants were playing havoc with his flying, and where on the map of the galaxy the peaceful little blue dot of Alderaan glowed, before them there was nothing except a rend in the Force, an invisible pit filled with pain and loss and _nothingness_, the smoothing out of the surface of the sea after a storm.

Glancing at the tac screen (as if for confirmation that _yes, there was supposed to be a whole _world _here)_ alerted Luke to a TIE fighter moving to flank them. "TIEs on the port–""That's a short-range fighter," Kenobi said.

"So it must have come from a base somewhere," Han said, sounding irritatingly like he wanted someone to be impressed by that knowledge–

"There aren't any around here. Alderaan doesn't conform to the Empire–"

"There it is," said Kenobi quietly, and Luke saw.

Distance and perspective confounded him at first–the thing must be closer to them than the tac screen would indicate; it looked so large, floating in space impossibly like a rock on the surface of the water. The TIE passed a few warning shots over the _Fate_ and then angled toward the space station. "Don't worry," Luke murmured, "I can get it before it gets there."

But the space station just kept looming larger, and his fingers stilled on the triggers as the TIE fighter took far longer than he expected to reach the thing. An abrupt realization shifted his sense of scale, and he closed his teeth with a_ click_ over a scathing Huttese curse as he realized that the space station was as large as a small moon. "That's impossible–"

But it wasn't, and even as he said it another klaxon screamed, indicating that the thing had swept them with a tractor beam. Luke wrenched the ship to the side, trying to get out of its field of influence, but it held tight, a secure lock now, and he let the curse escape.

"That looks like..." Han fumbled for words. "A moon."

Kenobi spoke almost reverently; "The Empire's mechanical substitute for one."

Switching full power to the engines only made the hums around them rise–the space station kept getting bigger and bigger–_by all the stars, the thing is the horizon–_

"You can't win," Ben said to Luke. "But there are alternatives to fighting."

His hands white, Luke slackened the engines. The Empire had them now, for all that he had tried to avoid it. They'd have to find a way to escape now, instead of a way to avoid.

The station-world opened its equatorial bays like a mouth to swallow them.

**Luke ushered his **passengers into the smuggling compartments beneath the deckplates. Han thought he pushed him on the back of the head a little harder than necessary, as he crouched down near the corner of the compartment and Luke perched above, to be the last one in. Han was _tired_ of this, of trying to hide from what would inevitably find them, knowing that a lone handful of people would never be able to fight the Empire. That princess better be worth it–because nothing else was. He would go back home as soon as he could.

But he must be wanted for abetting the Rebels there.

If he wasn't going to meet his fate here. These Imps might kill him as surely as they killed the Lars' and shot at Luke's ship...

No. He was their enemy now, whether he wanted to be or not, and the only thing he could do about it right now was _relax_, whether it was during hiding or fighting.

No matter how much it galled him to take orders from a spacer half his age, someone he'd call _kid _in a heartbeat if they met on the swoop track back home, someone who probably hadn't done an honest day's work–the kind where you got dirt under your fingernails and saw spots from the suns–in his life.

Luke and Kenobi had been speaking as Luke moved the floorboards into place.

"You said the Force 'sounded' like voices to you."

"We each perceive the Force in different ways."

"It was like movement for me; like vertigo."

"That likely explains why you so easily use it to help you pilot. A Jedi I once knew would have said the Force was like music. I sometimes find it helpful to consider it sound."

The panels cut the light off from them all.

**Luke felt the **familiar light bump as the ship set down. Shortly thereafter footsteps echoed metallically through the floor over their heads. He sensed the stormtroopers attached to those clumsy, booted footsteps, steadily glowing presence-lights like stars in his thoughts. He had not been lying when he said that the Force was like movement to him, but he could now consider a more approximate metaphor; it was like the landscape gravity made of space and time, with people as stars that could be perceived as both lights and sources of mass, depressions in the plane. Using the Force was like sliding down the slope toward one.

And Alderaan, _so _close, was now a galaxy of dead and massive stars...

He needed to _move_, or he would fall into the energy-wracked surface of their grief.

Luckily, movement had been part of the plan all along, and the Imperials had nearly touched the false plates with their feet.

At a whisper, he counted down from three for the benefits of the others before dislodging the panel with the Force and throwing it against the two exploring stormtroopers. They fell, and a moment later Luke and Susaa were pointing weapons at the scrabbling men. The lightsaber-hum might be heard outside, so Luke moved quickly, jamming his left hand under the slick plastic armor at the trooper's chin and wrenching it upward to reveal the man's swarthy, crewcut visage. The terminal curve of the lightsaber sent lime-green reflections dancing across the man's neck. Luke made sure he wasn't going to damage the armor–

and heard Han scream, "You can't just kill them!"

"Quiet," Susaa growled as he grappled with the other trooper for possession of his blaster.

Han continued, "That'll make you no better than them–"

Luke heard stun bolts ring out behind him, and sensed stormtroopers that must have come around from another entrance, probably blasting through the cargo hold while the others distracted him. Susaa wrested the blaster into his hands just as Han was felled by a blue stun ring. _They're not afraid of me, _Luke thought with some surprise. _They don't fear Jedi._

He tried to lift his lightsaber to deflect the stun bolt hurling toward him, but the man whose throat he had been about to cut had moved and gotten an iron grip on Luke's hand around the lightsaber hilt. Luke had time to see Ben Kenobi slipping away along the corridor, blurry even to his Force-assisted sight, before his world went blue.


	11. Chapter 11

**XI**

Luke woke bound, his hands in binders in front of him bolted to the floor. The room was dim, nacreous green floorlights dimly picking out the four bare walls. He raised himself off his stomach, got his feet beneath him. He blinked away grogginess, felt a bitter, sterile taste on the roof of his mouth. He could remember the tussle with the stormtroopers, and the space station swallowing his ship. He was in Imperial hands now, and he silently cursed himself and Han Solo and Ben Kenobi for getting him into this before thinking that Jedi shouldn't hold such grudges.

He tested the binders, and found them predictably solid.

The door in front of him slid open. Red light washed in, almost blinding him to two shapes, one humanoid and one eerily asymmetrical and floating. He angrily blinked again, and they resolved themselves into a man and a droid.

The man was all crisp lines; a grey military uniform, cropped brown hair as thin as the short fur of a puppy, a human face neither pale nor sunburnished. His uniform marked him as an Imperial officer, and he was accompanied by an eyeless black droid as malevolent as a spike-collared watchdog.

The officer needed no preamble. "You are wanted for smuggling, carrying false identification, and possession of illegal weapons."

Luke was struck with the realization that if Vader knew his real name, he would know Luke's father's connection to the Jedi—then owning a lightsaber would be the least thing the Empire would be after him for.

"Don't be concerned with me," the officer snapped, perhaps picking up a change on Luke's face or like an animal sensing his fear. "Vader will be here to interrogate you within the hour."

He backed out, leaving the droid lurking in the corner, its needles and clamps shining lurid in the low light like slavering teeth.

**Han Solo was **nearly bored to death. Frightened too—sitting in Imperial custody and not knowing his fate was tense. Were they going to kill him for anything from taking the Lars' droids to traveling with Luke Skywalker? Were they just going to let him _starve_ here?

On this morbid thought, he got up from the bench he had found himself on, hands balled into fists. He scoured the door for a lock, realized that he was breathing heavily and feeling his stomach lurch, moved to pound on the door—

It opened, revealing Ben Kenobi. Han gaped. "Where have you been?"

"Discovering the location of your cell," was the good-natured answer.

Han cautiously stepped out of the area in which he had been confined, looking left and right down the hallway that was filled with identical black-and-red metal doors. He asked, "Where are the droids?" Wasn't that loud little Artoo unit the whole reason they'd tried to get to Alderaan?

"I got them out of our ship, and then they hid themselves. The protocol droid has the commlink keyed to this one." He pressed the comm into Han's hand. Then his attention moved on from Han and he swept down the hallway with the once-farmhand trailing behind. "Our friend Luke is nearby."

"And the princess?"

"Shh."

Han almost ran into Ben. The old man had stopped short, and with good reason; at a junction of two hallways and a lift door was a control center of some sort, a round bank of computers with four or five dark-clothed officers and the same quantity of stormtroopers attending them. Kenobi held up a hand for Han to be silent; they had not yet been seen.

One of the Imperials was bent over the comm, speaking on another. Then he straightened and addressed the rest. "Look sharp. Lord Vader arrives within the shift."

"Luke's cell is beyond this point," Kenobi whispered. Within the space of Han blinking, a blaster was in Kenobi's hand that had not been there before. The old man passed it to Han and stepped beyond the lip of the occupied room.

"Hey—that's the prisoner!" Stun bolts and others not so human pinpointed Kenobi and Han with accuracy that surprised the latter so much that he almost fumbled the blaster. But Kenobi's sky-blue lightsaber sprang to life in his hands and deflected the barrage, felling three Imperials at the onset. Han's fingers slipped into place at the blaster's trigger as a sort of clarity came over him. He watched the suddenly disorganized Imperials as one officer molded limply against the computer console as he fell dead or stunned.

Han Solo was no pushover. He had stood by vaporators with a blaster rifle ready while Sand People lurked along the dunes with rusted-metal gaffi sticks and their own blasters. He knew, in the dim recesses of his past, how to fight and steal to live on the dirty streets of Corellia.

He hated the thought of harming a man who was at his mercy, but this firefight suddenly felt like his element. He, on principle, did not want to kill, but it would be so easy and convenient to do so—

He used the stun setting. Some shots missed and plashed against the walls, but by the end of the flurry –Han dodging back and forth behind the doorjam, his only cover, and Kenobi wading into the smoke and the press of people to cut off hands—all of the Imperials were incapacitated. When the room was quiet, Kenobi swept back to him. "Take out the cameras. Luke is somewhere beyond here."

Han pinpointed the shining faces of security cams as Kenobi hurried on. His shots were messy, but he thought he got them all. The silent, stunned bodies looked eerie and murdered in the harsh light.

The comm chirruped. A tinny voice was projected into the room. "What's happening?"  
Han rushed over to the comm set. He just needed to make them think he belonged there—"Uh...had a slight weapons malfunction. But, uh,everything's perfectly all right now. We're fine. We're all fine here, now, thank you. How are you?"

"We're sending a squad up."

"Ah. Negative, negative. We've had, a, uh, reactor leak, very dangerous—"

"What's your operating number?"

Han looked around in exasperation, quickly discarding the idea of pulling a number from one of the dead troopers. Without thinking much about it he aimed his blaster and shot the comm console, leaving a smoking crater in its place. "Boring conversation anyway—Ben, we're gonna have company!"

But Kenobi had disappeared inside one of the cells, and emerged with Luke. The smuggler's blue eyes were wide. When he neared Han, he breathed, "Vader is coming. Wait, where's Susaa and the droids?"

"And Chewbacca," Han added to the question, realizing that he hadn't thought of the Wookiee since his capture.

"The droids are safe," Ben says, "Han has a commlink to contact them. I don't know where Susaa and Chewbacca are, but Artoo will be able to access records of prisoner transfers. The princess of Alderaan is in one of these cells. Artoo will also know which. I am going after Vader."

Han activated the commlink. Luke said, "Isn't that dangerous?"

"Vader is," said Kenobi, "but so am I. You and the princess must take the droids and escape—I will deal with Vader and myself."

Soon after Kenobi left, disappearing in a sweep of desert-brown cloak down the constricting halls, the footfalls of booted stormtroopers echoed toward Han and Luke.

"You hold them off—I'll call Artoo!" Han said. He more than half expected the smuggler to protest, but he did not; instead he picked up a blaster from a fallen stormtrooper and readied it. He began to go through desk drawers, snapping their locks with a twist of the Force when he needed to, looking for his lightsaber and gear. Han moved down the cell block the way he had come.

He whispered into the commlink, wondering in a small, frightened part of himself whether it made any sense for him to worry about the Imperials overhearing this way if they were about to arrive in the cell block at any moment. "Ah, Artoo-Deetoo?"

"Oh, sir Han, it's such a relief to hear from you—"

"See-threepio. Where are you?"

"Oh dear, oh, we are in a command center of some sort…"

"I need Artoo to tell me where the Alderaan princess is."

He heard some shuffling and beeping, then, "Cell 2187."

"Okay, thanks." He dropped the commlink into a belt pocket as he moved down the hall and scanned the numbers stenciled on the walls. He found and opened 2187 as he heard Luke's lightsaber shriek to life and Imperials storm into the room.

Han slowly moved into the cell. The princess lay on a bench against the back of the cell, her eyes doe-brown and her sheath dress white as a shimmer-lily flower. As soon as she noticed him, she propped her head on her hand as if to, despite her fierce glare, prove that she was as comfortable in the cell as on a couch in a palace. "Who are you?"

"Ah, I'm Han Solo. I'm here to rescue you."

Something bumped against Han's shoulder. He yelped and turned to see Luke, lightsaber lit and raised to deflect the blasterbolts lancing toward them both. Sounds seemed to snap back into Han's life, and he realized that the princess had profoundly affected him. It wasn't, or wasn't just, that she was beautiful—

"You're doing a good job!" she called sarcastically, as she pushed past Han to take a blaster from Luke as soon as he proffered it. Stormtroopers were coming from both sides of the hall now. The corridor was filling with blasterbolts and smoke, and Skywalker was struggling to pull the backpack-shape of his jetpack over his shoulder. Han heard a clanging and saw the white-clad princess kneeling low on the floor by a dark, gaping entrance to a hole just large enough for a person to fit through.

She cried, "Into the garbage chute!"

Luke's lightsaber hummed and sent half-moon sweeps of neon green flashing around Han on all sides. This shielded him as he dashed from one wall-strut to another and, spurred by the princess' 'hurry up' gesture and sharp look as much as by the hot lasers grazing his hair. He pushed himself into the tunnel, and as he began to slide downward heard the princess follow him and the lightsaber-hum shut off. A rancid smell seemed to strike him across the face.


	12. Chapter 12

**XII**

The cold, watery gunk on the floor of the garbage room eked over the top of Luke's boots. The rusty metal of the room creaked where the walls met the floor. The thickness of the walls could not be told, but Luke could imagine that he felt the weight of the Death Star pressing down on them, calling for meters of ferrocrete. Illusory gravity concentrated here.

Spars and pipes were propped crazily up, leaning against the walls and each other. Luke ducked a few of them as he slogged across the garbage pit, trying not to think about the weight of space pressing down on the Death Star, moving it along, as surely as the floor above depended on this subterranean but sky-borne room. The present was too important for imaginative thoughts, but since the princess had come out of captivity the Force had been scratching at the doors of his awareness, pushing him out of the moment and into something formless and larger. These events were important, he sensed with a certainty that he had never felt about anything besides machinery before, but they were also _wrong_.

He pressed the hilt of his lightsaber against the side of the door—it was made to open from the other side so that the Imperials could toss garbage in, and there were no controls on the inside. He activated the blade, began to drag it around the inset shape of the door. Han and the princess' argument about shooting the magnetically sealed hatch came to an abrupt end.

Luke _knew _that the hallway outside was deserted, but still it was a relief when no Imperial appeared when the shorn door crashed to the exquisitely polished floor. Han and the princess climbed out behind him, the rancid smell clinging to their white clothes.

"Leia, right?" Luke said as he looked around the corridor for the omnipresent security cams. "You can handle a blaster?"

"Sure I can. Who exactly are you people?"

"I'm Luke Skywalker." A few meters down the hall, a camera turned to look at him; he wrenched it from the wall with the Force and it fell to the ground with a _crunch _of scattered components. Troopers would be on their way, but they wouldn't know which direction their prey had chosen. "We're here with General Kenobi." _Heading for the Rebellion, I suppose._

Leia's crisp voice segued neatly from accusation to surprise. "Obi-Wan Kenobi? Is he here?"

"Somewhere," Luke replied. He could sense a mass of Force presences coming their way. "He's gone to get my ship out of a tractor beam.

"We got your message from an astro droid."

Leia caught her lower lip under her teeth; a girl's expression, but her eyes were experienced, and screened over with anger. She held the blaster calmly, low in two hands as if she knew how to use it. "We've gotta get out of here. Get back to the Rebellion."

"That's not going to be easy—" Luke pressed his back against the wall, and waved the others to do the same as blasterbolts lanced, screaming, across his field of vision.

Luke could nearly see them, the scores of troopers just out of sight. He could glimpse another hallway angling away from both groups of people, so he met Han's eyes, kept his voice low—although that was not a great concern because Leia leaned around the corner and loosed a flurry of shots—and said "We're gonna cross the hall—stay behind me."

He stepped out into the line of fire, lightsaber spinning as a shield in his hands. Leia was right behind him, dashing across the hall. A blasterbolt pinged off the lightsaber's end and Luke saw Han duck, then stumble. As Leia and Luke entered the empty corridor a bevy of stormtroopers came between them and Han.

Leia kept firing, but more troopers replaced the ones she felled. A blasterbolt hit Luke's right shoulder with the force of a punch; even dissipated by the armor it nearly spun him around. Leia was proving far more useful than he had hoped, but Han, while clearly alive and glowing in the Force, was gone, carried off struggling by stormtroopers. With almost psychic coordination, Leia ran fluidly down the hallway where Luke had been about to tell her to go, and the Jedi followed. The door at the end of the upward-sloping corridor was closed, but its control panel glowed green, and as predicted it slid opened when Leia approached it.

Not at all as predicted, when Luke dashed through the doorway he found himself in a cavernous space. The floor-become-bridge stretched out two meters in front of him and Leia and then ended as if shorn off. A chasm away, another open door sowed where a retractable bridge could be extended to meet it. Above and below was a pipe containing countless smaller ones, and yellow pinprick lights, like a jungle in the starlight. Leia swayed for a moment in the face of the edge.

The next few moments, Luke realized later, were a flurry of countermeasures that could have been comical if they weren't so deadly. Luke tried to use the Force to explore the other side of the pit and activate the bridge, but the presences of stormtroopers behind him, and the blasterbolts they were about to loose, did not allow him concentration. Smoke billowed as Leia shot the door control panel on their side. The door slammed nearly all the way down, stopping the incoming fire, but trapping the two on the bridge.

There were troopers approaching the far door now. Luke holstered his lightsaber and primed his jetpack. Thank the Force, he thought, the Imperials haven't drained the fuel. "Here—we'll fly across."

The princess put her arms around his shoulders, the blaster still clenched in her hand scraping against the top of the jetpack. He held her under the knees as he would a child, and the kiss and her breath on his cheek were quick things, nothing to be dwelling on now. "For luck."

The kick of the jetpack activating threw them off the bridge. Luke kept them flying stable and straight. The door with its retracted bridge hurtled toward them.

**The fear paralyzed **him. Han could _feel _the handful of blasters pointed at his back as vividly as if they were burning holes in him all ready. The stormtroopers weren't killing him, and for a moment that really irked him. He'd like nothingness—or, infinitely preferably, to see Leeta's face as he stepped back onto Tatooine—rather than this uncertainty as he stared at the skull-faced armor of the troopers and wondered what they were going to do to him.

The daydreaming brought him back to himself enough to answer the questions fired at him from behind one of the masks. "Where are the others? Your Rebel friends."

"I don't know. You saw them as well as I did. Better; you got in my way."

Red light and pain engulfed his vision; someone had hit him across the back of the head with a blaster.

"You could be lying," the stormtrooper said as Han's vision swam. "We don't know you aren't the Jedi."

_Do you see a lightsaber? _He was tempted to say, but decided quickly against it as with a clicking of armor the troopers moved off down the hallway and pushed Han along with them.

With the grim, heavily armed crowd of them Han walked into a cavernous room, where yet another crowd of stormtroopers were working on machinery; forklifts and speeder engines and less recognizable things. These troopers had safety goggles instead of helmets, but the near-shaved heads in all shades of human hair were no more reassuring than the masks. Interspersed with the Imperials were beings that really stood out in all the gray and white—brown Wookiees, a dull green reptilian, a red-furred Bothan.

Just as he thought the troopers were stopping, they moved forward a few steps. An olive-coated superior parted their ranks like a jet trail in blue sky.

Glancing aside, Han started and cursed. The officer's thin lips curled as if Han reeked, but the farmer didn't care—he saw Chewbacca bent over by one of the human-height engine blocks, tied to the engine with a manacle and handing a hydrospanner to a stormtrooper.


	13. Chapter 13

**XIII**

Han's jokes about not being a Jedi had, in his mind, concreted his hopelessness. He would be enslaved in this labyrinthine place among men made alien by masks, and there would be no hope of escape.

But when he saw Chewbacca living out that nightmare, he felt swept up in a wash of determination. "Chewie!" he called out, and the Wookiee reacted immediately. One long forearm, like a tree branch draped with hanging moss-fur, swung and knocked over the stormtrooper who had been about to receive the hydrospanner.

Han dashed toward the place where the Wookiee was chained, with a vague plan to get a blaster in hand and release Chewie. Behind him he dimly heard the Imperial officer shouting orders, then a more familiar voice—Susaa's, shouting, "Han!" The farmer saw, across the room, brown wings snap open and strike three troopers with the thick-boned rib-struts before the alien tucked his wings back against his body to avoid a rain of stun rungs. Susaa too was working for the Imperials, in an oil-stained vest, but for whatever task he had been set it wasn't necessary that he be chained, and he had just stunned his attendant guard.

Han dove for the blaster that the trooper Chewbacca had felled had been carrying, scrabbling at the man's gear belt. Suddenly his vision went white; the white-cased and black-gloved fist forward again informed him that the trooper had punched him. His bearings were gone. But Chewbacca lurched into his field of vision, a grounding force, and tackled the trooper. The Wookiee easily pinned the man's arms down, and Han snatched the blaster from its holster.

One bolt _ping_ed off the metal strips binding Chewie to the engine block, then the second parted it. Han noticed then that some clamor had died down; the crowd of troopers had begun to shift to the other side of the large room, where more Imperials were entering in an unorganized gaggle. He heard the phrases "saboteurs", and "Jedi".

Susaa appeared next to Han. "Head for the hallway." He looked toward the way Han had been brought in.

Han and Chewbacca ran for that possibility of freedom, ducking blasterbolts. Troopers leaned out from behind crates and craft on both sides of them, and for a few timeless moments Han was sure that the hope had been false, that he would be shot here and lay as still as if he were buried beneath the sand of Tatooine. Then he stumbled around the corner into the empty hall.

Chewbacca and an especially enthusiastic stormtrooper followed Han around at about the same time. A blasterbolt splashed against the wall next to Han's head. Chewbacca was tired, weighed down still by the chain on his wrist, his eyes small and red surrounded by pale skin. He swung the chain, whipped it across the front of the stormtrooper's helmet hard enough to spin the man around and crack the reflective plates over his eyes. Han witnessed Wookiee rage as Chewbacca rushed forward, arms raised and a growl spilling from his throat, to crush the trooper against the wall.

Han saw the trooper pull his blaster from his belt and stick the nose against Chewbacca's stomach.

Han tackled the man, half an inch away from the furious tower of fur that Chewbacca had become. The blasterbolt shrieked across the hall, but it mattered not at all to Han because they were in a fistfight now, plastic-armored gauntlets cutting stinging welts across Han's sweating face—

A shot rang out; the trooper went limp and Han rolled away. He looked up to see the blaster in Chewie's hands. Han took a deep breath.

And was then breathless as Chewbacca squeezed him in a musty-smelling embrace.

"You're welcome!" Han gasped. "You saved my life too—"  
Chewie barked and let Han go. The human turned to see Susaa come flying—literally—across the large room they had just come from. Smoke was streaming from the ragged ruin of his left ear. The handful of stormtroopers remaining—the others, Han realized, had probably gone after Leia, Luke, or Ben—fired tentatively at the Kentra as he looked over his shoulder and shot back.

Two meters from the retracted door between the room and the hallway, Susaa threw the blaster at the door's control panel. The ponderous curtain came slowly down. Blasterfire increased, filling the narrowing gap with smoke.

Susaa speared his wins flat, dipped toward the ground, and flew under the door heartbeats before the gap would have been too narrow. He hit the floor in a flurry of limbs and wing, and popped to his feet. "Woo! Let's go." He took a deep breath. "Han, comm the droids and tell them to get to the ship."

Han and Chewie followed as he hurried down the hall.

**Luke could sense **the coming convergence. He and Leia ran down the corridors of the Death Star, the chasm untold meters behind them. Leia crouched with the blaster in her hands as he scanned the landscape of the Force. Han, Susaa, and Chewbacca were nearby; Kenobi too, and the malevolent presence of Vader. Luke could even sense the _Rogue's Fate_—not as a living aura, but he _knew _it was close, knew that something about it—perhaps above and beyond the fact that it was going to get them off the space station--was important. Another man might rebel against such a perceived infringement of his free will, but to Luke it was a reassurance, a guarantee that he was on the path he wanted to be on. The thrill of flinging himself out into the life of a smuggler was only sweetened by the knowledge that the Force would provide him a surface to land on.

"Cameras ahead," Leia said. She stopped at a corner, peeked around.

Luke stopped with her. "There's stormtroopers nearby also."

"I know. I can hear them."

"The ship is just ahead. We can make a run for it."

Blastershots rang out from a few turns of the hall away. Leia said, "Sounds like someone already has."

With a oneness of mind that Luke hardly noticed, he and Leia rushed together toward the sounds of battle. Luke moved ahead to shield their charge with the lightsaber.

The room they emerged into was expansive. The entirety of the three-story wall to the left was the spangled dark of space, framed with the blue glow of a force field. _Rogue's _Fate, as well as multiple Imperial starships and lifts, occupied the floor. Two hallways flanked with retracted blast doors opened onto the right-hand wall. Through one of these openings, Luke saw Susaa run with Han and Chewbacca close behind.

Leia charged at the open ramp of the _Fate_, firing as she ran. She felled two stormtroopers that had gravitated toward Han before they noticed her. Luke sped toward Han, looking around for anything he could use to take out the majority of the troopers, who had spilled from the hallways and from around the Imperial ships. A TIE Fighter docking rack, a skeletal black cube hanging above him, would work; he began to wrench at its anchors with the Force.

Then he felt as though the mental plane had gone cold. Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi hove into view from around the corner of another hallway, lightsabers flashing up and down between them, contacting in white founts of sparks. Vader's past cruelties sliced into Luke's Force awareness like white cracks spreading in blue ice. One corner of the TIE cage lurched toward the floor, and Luke, while revolted by Vader's intrusion into his thoughts, used the emotion he felt to loosen another one of its corners. Stormtroopers, hearing the echoing scream of parting metal, looked up and scattered away from the floor beneath the cage. Luke saw Han and the two aliens run past him in a flash of brown, but Luke was caught between Vader's presence and his control over the TIE cage. The ice cracked; frigid water swallowed him.

He felt the history between Vader and Kenobi; knew how much he did not know about the meaning behind each sword-swing. Between the ponderous strikes Vader spoke words just as cutting.

Blasterbolts shrieked and discharged plumes of smoke next to Luke, bursting his focus. Troopers had regrouped, moved to surround him, hesitant to shoot in such close quarters to each other. But Obi-Wan was looking at him, staring, and Luke could not move—

Obi-Wan tossed his lightsaber toward Luke. It arced, shut off, became a dead haft of silver. Luke raised his hand and felt it smack into his palm. He lunged forward, seeing Obi-Wan standing straight and hooded in front of Vader's swinging crimson blade. The Dark Lord parted the fabric between Obi-Wan's head and shoulders, and the Jedi's brown cloak fell to the ground with an empty swinging of fabric. Luke felt Obi-Wan's presense fade away into the greater Force, and his brain was filled with its falling fragments and the urge to take his revenge on Vader.

Luke leapt toward the approaching stormtroopers, longing for the solid resistance of a lightsaber blade cutting through flesh instead of the dreadful, insubstantial, emptiness between himself and the blast doors curling closed in front of Vader—He activated Obi-Wan's weapon and put the momentum of his forward motion into pinwheeling the blades over his head and around, cutting through the air in front of the fidgeting, _useless _stormtroopers—

But Leia shouted from the ship's ramp. "Luke! Let's go!" Her voice cracked over his name.

And the Force coalesced into words, into Obi-Wan calling "Run, Luke, run," and so he turned, blasters finally fixing on him so that he needed to turn and sweep the lightsabers in green and blue lines of incandescence to send the bolts back to their originators. He made the ramp and hurried inside with Leia at his heels, slapped the wall panel to retract and seal the ramp.

Han and the others were standing in the common room; Han asked "Are you alright?" as Luke passed.

"Are you?"

"We were enslaved and shot at, but yeah, otherwise it's been a great day."

Leia said, "If you're really here to help me, take me to Yavin IV. The Rebellion will decode the R2 unit's message."

"Oh, right, the droids," Han said. "They're onboard?"

"They better be." Luke clambered into the pilot's seat.

R2-D2's whistled overlapped with C-3PO's "We're here, sir," and the droids tottered out of the food prep alcove, the protocol droid nearly tripping over his rotund companion as they entered the common room.

"I'll set the course in," said Susaa, and headed for the navicomp.

Luke started the ship, felt the humming energy of the engines touch every corner. Troopers outside the viewport scattering for the sides of the hanger brought a wry smile to his face. He spurred the ship forward, made it leap through the blue force field and out into space. He prepped to go to hyperspace as the Death Star receded behind him, the antagonism of the people within it seeming to reach out in the Force like grasping hands. He would not let it reach the five lives in his ship.

Susaa gave the sign and Luke shifted to hyperspace. One vacuum became another, and Susaa gave a laugh of relief, but Luke imagined Vader's visage floating in the star-tunnel before him, watching still.


	14. Chapter 14

**XIV**

Luke Skywalker had felt hate before. Of course, it was difficult to tell where the pale, petty displeasures of each day ended and an emotional hue bright enough to be named 'hate' began, but he was almost certain of the difference. He had always passively hated the injustice and discrimination with which the Empire ruled, and had learned today how easily that hate turned into open defiance.

But all other emotions faded in the glare of the hate he felt for Darth Vader. As soon as the ship was shooting through hyperspace on its own power he wrenched his hands from the controls and stalked across the common room, too tempted to turn the ship around to keep his seat. Vader had taken Luke's father away (his mother, too, if what Ben had said about her pining away could be believed), and now he had taken the Jedi too, along with any chance of Luke's learning more about his past.

He sat in the common room glaring at Han, not seeing at all that it was the farmer, not Darth Vader, standing in front of him, until Han shied away and Leia replaced him. Hands on her knees, she looked at him with the same sharp composure that she had displayed in the detention cell. She simply stared, asking without talking what he wanted her to do, reminding him silently that she had lost her planet.

The force of that blow she had taken had been spread out, difficult as it was to comprehend, and Luke's wound was as concentrated as the point of a knife. Tomorrow he would begin to heal, and she would begin to bruise.

At the same time the two of them began to say "There was nothing you could have done," and trailed off.

They sat in silence for a moment, Luke unable to feel Leia's slender fingers perched on the armor plate over his shoulder.

"**Your base is **in these ruins?" Han said with a slight twang of disdain as the _Rogue's Fate _skimmed over the mint-green forest and stone edifices of Yavin IV. The unexpectedly allied crew had gathered in the cockpit to view the approach.

"They've been made completely modern inside," Leia replied quietly. A moment ago, her voice had been crisp and commanding as she spoke to the Rebel watchman on the comm. "The Imperials never suspected such a primitive world."

The forest slid by beneath the forward-jutting pilot's seat like a sea, its islands the tan towers and step pyramids that a forgotten civilization had left behind. "It's a beautiful place," Luke said.

"It's a dangerous place too," Leia replied. "Animals, crystal storms, tidal floods."

"You don't need to go somewhere far off to find nice things to look at," Han said. "Tatooine has got beauty too."

Luke did not react to his angry tone, although one of Susaa's ears twitched back toward his neck. Luke glanced aside, knowing that he and Susaa needed to talk in private later, about how involved with the Rebellion they and their ship were going to be—and that a secret military base was not a likely place for two small-time smugglers to go unnoticed.

Blue-vested Rebel soldiers waving neon glowrods guided the _Fate _into the hanger. The ship had a space of its own beneath the heavy lip of the ziggurat that the Rebels had chosen for their center of operations. Further back sat round-nosed Y-Wings and X-Wings with spindly laser cannons. At first glance it was an armada, but on a second, Luke saw that, compared to the vast Imperial fleet, if this was the Rebels' entire force they would be sorely pressed in battle.

A contingent including woven-robed Rebel officers and armed guards met Leia at the ship's ramp. A white-bearded man embraced her. "Princess Leia. So good to see you safe."

After a moment of folding herself into the man's arms Leia stood as straight and proper as ever while R2-D2 trundled up to nudge her hand. "I'm glad to be back, general. Now, this droid contains the information that the Empire has been seeking."

"We'll get on it right away."

A tech came to lead the droid away, a thick rope of cable in hand.

"General Dodonna," Leia continued, "These men helped saved my life. Luke Skywalker; his first mate, Susaa; Han Solo, and Chewbacca."

Dodonna shook their hands. His expression never changed from warm, but Luke could sense reticence and some suspicion. Naturally, whether on the surface someone was as young as Leia or old as Dodonna, they were at heart Rebel leaders. "Thank you. You will be a great help to us." Hardly a moment after he finished speaking his gaze roamed over the _Fate_ as if in desperation for more firepower.

"We're—" Han began to protest, but Luke cut him off with a fist almost thumping the farm boy's chest. Crude but effective.

Leia picked up on his desire to sort their plans out in private. "Why doesn't someone show these men to quarters where they can rest, while I speak to the general." She turned to Han. "I'll talk to you soon."

Two others who had gathered among the techs snapped to attention and beckoned for the four to follow them. They proceeded through the cavernous hanger and into a turbolift that whisked them up what felt like tens of stories. Leia had been right about the modernization of the building; the ride was smooth, the doors in the hallway they entered framed and locked in modern fashion. But the stone floors looked as if they had been mortared for eons without moving, and Luke could see sigils carved along every stretch of floor, as if the ways were surrounded with sentences.

The Rebels left them with one guard—or perhaps just a resident, but Luke doubted it—at the far end of the corridor. As Susaa and Chewbacca began to explore the small dormitory, Han rounded on Luke.

"We aren't really going to stay here."

Luke folded his arms. "I can't tell you what you're going to do. But the Rebellion needs our help—and the Empire needs to end. Susaa and I are going to stay."

"This cause is all well and noble, but I have a home to get back to and people who are gonna wonder where I am—"

"Han, I've got those things too. But you saw what the Empire can do."

With a whuff of approval Chewie ambled up behind Han, whose shoulders jumped as the Wookiee kept up his loud dialogue.

Luke translated, realizing as he did that perhaps this was exactly what Han didn't want to hear. "He reminds you that you saw what the Empire was doing to him and Leia, and that you performed admirably on the battle station, earning a life debt."

"Kid, this is all very well and good for you, but I'm going back to my life." Han stormed off down the hall. The turbolift opened at his approach, and he punched a button that looked like the result of a belief in "anywhere is better than here" rather than a desire for a particular destination. Luke ran after him, but the doors closed. The young Jedi sighed and reached out in the Force, tracking Han's presence to a floor below the ground-floor hanger.

Susa approached, but Luke said, "Stay here—the more of us obey the rules, the better," and called the lift back up.

**Luke found Han **on the narrow, railed platform overhanging the underground hanger. He hadn't moved more than five steps from the turbolift, but stood with his hands on the metal railing and his mouth agape.

This level had been hewn out of more of the tan rock, with modern comforts such as the turbolift station and overhead lights suspended on cords. A starship-grade lift platform rose to their right on thick hydraulic legs, bringing an X-Wing up to the ground floor where the _Fate _was also parked. Along with somewhat fewer starships than there had been above, the room which stretched across the entire level contained many more people; people dragging cables or consulting computers, talking to or modifying droids, readying ships, or talking to one another. The room also held a few relatively small passenger ships for the evacuation and transport of those who were not fighter pilots, and the object of Han's attention.

"Can't you just imagine that flying?" Han asked as Luke came to stand at the rail beside him. The smuggler thought that Han would have said it even had no one been in earshot.

A brown-haired man in a sienna bomber jacket bounded up the stairs from the hanger floor, and before Luke could apologize for being down here, the Rebel said, "Isn't she beautiful? She's called _Millennium Falcon_."

"I've never seen anything as sleek as that, eh Skywalker?" Han said.

The ship was a large freighter, saucer-shaped, with a beaklike extended module and its top punctuated with sensor dishes and two laser canons. The engines were large and looked aftermarket; many panels that could have been covered with smooth plates were left with their rivets exposed. Luke thought that it looked rugged but classically capable. He wouldn't have looked at it like Han was, though; as if an old friend had at last come home and it was as if they had never parted.

"You've got a good eye for ships," said the Rebel, and he and Han comfortably shook hands. "I'm Wedge Antilles. You came in on the Raven J-7?"

Han had to look at Luke for confirmation of the make and model, and the two got in a good scowl at each other before Wedge reached out for Luke too. "Welcome to the crew."

"About that," Han said gruffly. "But about that ship—"

The turbolift doors opened and the platform was suddenly very full. Susaa had found Leia, or vice versa.

"Did I ask you to stay in your rooms until someone could show you around?" Leia said.

"Sure, your worshipfulness. But I never said I was gonna be a good little soldier—"

Her voice instantly became calm and controlled. "No one is going to forcibly recruit you, Han. We will provide a reward for your services."

Han's expression slackened. "Oh. Whatever reward you thought up for us is great, but I want that ship."

All eyes turned to the _Millennium Falcon_."Our fleet needs all the ships it has," Leia said, but Wedge Antilles held up a hand.

"Princess, we don't have enough pilots trained on large ships. She'll be invaluable to use, but not without a crew."

"Between me and Chewbacca we'll do it," Han said. Luke remembered Han asking very good questions about his ship, but that didn't mean he could fly a freighter.

Leia thought for a moment. "Mister Solo. If you agree to use the _Falcon _in the Rebellion's aid in our next engagement, it is yours. Without any other reward."

Han looked stormy. "Fine."

"You need training in it first," Luke muttered.

Wedge said, "We can send her up in a few hours."

"Good, princess, that settles things," said Han.

Her lips were pursed. "I suppose it does." She looked at Luke and Susaa. "You have the decision to make too."

"I'll stay," Luke said immediately. "The Empire has dues to pay." Leia's smile almost distracted him from Susaa's noncommittal nod.

"Thank you," Leia said.

There was a moment of silence in which Wedge looked at the chrono on his wrist. "If anybody wants a tour, see the ships, we'll be done in time for mess."

While Luke was interested in the ziggurat and the men and women he would be flying with, the others declined and ascended in the turbolift again.

To Luke, Wedge seemed to be one of those rare beings who acted toward someone he had just met—or at least, a recruit to his cause that he had just met-- as if they had been friends for years. He explained how the _Millennium Falcon _had belonged to a businessman named Lando Calrissian, who had complained of quirks and unidentifiable sounds from the engines and whom had traded the ship to a not-then-Rebel in exchange for a more comfortable craft and a large sum of credits. But the new pilot and co-pilot had been killed in a freak accident involving life support during the first time the ship entered combat, leaving the ship without a crew and, as Wedge put it, "At worst haunted and at best as ornery as a bull reek."

He guided Luke through both hangers, through musty smells of rock and sharp ones of engine fluids. "I wasn't lying when I said your friend had a good eye. The _Falcon_'s got the best hyperdrive around."

But Luke could sense that the man's outgoing nature was not a product of naiveté, and that he was testing Luke's character as much as General Dodonna had been. Wedge's X-Wing bore six silhouettes of TIE fighters—kill marks.

The tour ended in the mess hall two floors up, where Rebels—mostly human males, the least likely demographic for the Empire to keep close watch on—sat at long tables and ate savory-smelling soup and rolls—surprisingly, not protein packs. Wedge introduced "the roguish boys of Red Squadron", including Red Leader, an older man who would have made Jedi Master had Ben's ability to stare right through a person conferred that title, and Biggs Darklighter, who hailed from Han's homeworld of Tatooine. Sitting there with the press of voices around him Luke was reminded of dinners with his adopted family. He would contact Muurkal this evening, tell her all that he had done and seen. She had always felt that the Empire needed to be changed, and now Luke would, for Muurkal and Ben and Leia and his father, work toward changing it.

**On the roof of **the towering building, Luke felt as if he could take the Force in and breathe it out like the air. The building stood like a finger pointing toward the mottled sherbet-orange sphere of Yavin; not since training with Ben had Luke felt so keyed to the life energy. But without a sparring partner whose moves he could sense, what was there he could do with it? Darth Vader and the emperor, dark Force users of the highest order, would as surely destroy him as they would someone with no powers at all.

Then, like a ripple of breeze, he sensed Leia emerge from the low doorway that Luke had come through earlier. She sat down next to him, both of their pairs of legs swinging over the tossing heads of the trees below. He knew that she felt glad to see him and as content as she could be with the threat of the Empire fresh in her thoughts of past and future, despite her curt tone. "How did you get up here?"

"I just wandered. Went where I was taken." That was true; he had taken the lift as far as it would go, into corridors unaugmented and dusty but as sturdy as the ones below. "How did you get up here?"

She smiled. "I followed you."

He was not sure what to say, and so looked at the trees. She seemed content with that, her sharp eyes following his gaze out to the horizon. It had been a long time since Luke had truly relaxed on a planet, had been able to take in its smells.

After a moment he asked her a question—it seemed the only way to keep his thoughts from cycling constantly back and back to the same point. "Have you ever felt separated from other people?"

She wasn't going to spill emotion that quickly. "What do you mean?"

"I was raised with dozens of alien brothers and sisters. We knew we weren't really related, but we acted like it. Were comfortable with it. I realize I've never been in a population largely made up of humans before. With Force-sensitivity, I feel even more alien than I did with…aliens. You know?"

Her smile was more sincere this time. "You're softer than Han. It might seem otherwise, but you are, in ways, the naïve one."

She continued, "It's human to feel alien."

They sat in silence for a time, until orange-tinted evening fell.


	15. Chapter 15

**XV**

After hours of training in the X-Wing simulator and then a briefing about the Empire's ships and strategies and how they planned to defeat the Death Star, Luke just wanted a rest. Maybe a shower. The warm, humid air of Yavin IV seemed to cling to him, trapped…

No. It wasn't the air that was pressing down and occupying his thoughts. It was the Force. Someone, somewhere, was trapped and needed to get _out—_

Almost blindly, Luke ran.

As he rushed down into the hanger, he saw immediately that he wasn't the only one flustered. Techs rushed around, shouting into their comms. The _Millennium Falcon _was moving out in front of the ziggaurat, engines glowing. Luke hesitated just outside the shadow of the hanger, beyond the range of the departing ship's rocket backlash, and felt Han and Chewbacca cold and gunning for freedom.

Wedge stood nearby with a flight helmet in one hand and comm in the other, almost shouting into it. "Do you want me to go bring him _back_?"  
Pause—Wedge listened. Luke watched the _Falcon _turn and rise up on roaring light.

"Yes, Princess." Wedge lowered the comm and looked levelly at Luke. "She says we're not to keep anyone against their will, that the ship was nearly useless…" He muttered, "We could've used it for parts."

Was this what the kid from Tatooine really wanted? Or the Wookiee—Luke thought that the life debt must have overcome Chewbacca's desire for revenge, not superseded it. "They may return," he said softly.

Wedge shook his head.

"**They've found us**," Leia said softly. Luke looked at the red circle indicating the Death Star cruising into the Yavin system and glared as if Vader could see him through it. "We knew they would," Leia continued. "They wouldn't have let us out of there without a tracking beacon. We're arrayed to fight it. General Dodonna, let the troops have their briefing in a few minutes. Susaa, you're staying here?"

"Yes ma'am." He had already taken up a post at a tracking screen, having explained to her and Luke that he didn't have experience piloting, but rather navigating—and that it would take some work to get his winged form to fit inside an X-Wing. Luke shivered for a moment. His ship had brought the Empire here. He would help drive it away again.

"**Red Two, standing **by."

"Red Eleven, standing by."

"Red Five, standing by." Luke felt the X-Wing rock slightly beneath him as the squadrons rose out of the atmosphere of Yavin IV. The starfighter handled and moved more like his jetpack than like a midsize ship like _Rogue's Fate. _After a few rounds of practice, Luke didn't know all the quirks and habits of the ship, but he knew he _liked_ it. The foot-pedals made turns as fast as thought.

But as the Rebels ranked their X-Wings and Y-Wings all around him and they all powered out into space, tac data beginning to stream and show the Death Star ahead, solemnity settled over Luke. He reached out into the Force, knowing that he would need to be in tune with his squadron mates, unused as he was to fighting in groups of ships. Yavin IV too faintly glowed in the Force, an adopted homeworld linked to the sparks of life riding out to protect it.

The comm crackled with Red Leader's first command as the Death Star turned from a patch of black against the stars to a construct three-dimensional as the planet. TIE fighters began to pour toward them, engines screaming.

Luke banked down and forward and watched how many TIEs followed him. Three; one that sped away as the X-Wing behind Luke turned to get it in its sights. Lasers lanced out beside him, red and green neon, and Luke sped up as the sky thickened with TIES.

He looped, kicked the X-Wing up onto its side. A laserbolt narrowly missed his wing and Artoo in his socket yowled. Luke felt the resolute mind of the TIE pilot, the calmness of him—he was prepared to kill.

And knowing that, was Luke?  
Wedge whipped past with a TIE on his tail. Luke pushed the joysticks forward so that he felt his seat press against his back. It was so easy and essential to squeeze the triggers the second his computer's crosshairs locked around the TIE. The Imperial ship was engulfed in fire. "Thanks!" Wedge shouted.

Luke felt the pilot's life wink out. He gritted his teeth.

The war went on.

**In the silver**-sheen corridors of the Death Star, Darth Vader lifted his masked head like a dog on a scent. The Force burned bright outside, a presence he had not felt since the death of Obi-Wan floating in the ether. It was like his Master's presence but also alien, tasting of Vader's mourning incarnate.

He curled his hands into fists, remembering the simple feel of body heat that his movement had once produced. He remembered once his mechanical hand had been crippled simply by a quirk of electricity, and he had raged alone while the emperor ignored Vader twisting all he owned into scrap metal works of art. Inaction did not sit well with a man who demanded as much control as Vader did.

And so, as he hooked himself into the TIE cockpit he thought of this strange, bright presence as every traitorous, selfish Jedi he had ever known. His mask could not be darker than his thoughts.

**Luke danced around ** a nimble TIE that nearly folded back over itself to get to him. He had thought the X-Wing was agile, and it was, but the TIE's smaller silhouette and compact, punchy engines gave it the advantage.

Gold Leader's voice came wearily over the comm. "It didn't go in." The first attempt on the reactor core had failed. Luke kicked his X-Wing down toward the Death Star's surface as commands came through audio and visual telling Red Squadron to form up for their run. The TIE followed him. The Death Star surface became flat and plated, gun towers noticing him and rotating. They spat lasers. Luke juked, breath catching.

Wedge slotted in behind him and fired. One TIE sped away and banked, but the joint between a wing panel and the cockpit broke. The wing clipped the Death Star ground and tore off, flailing with sparks that lit a firestorm inside the engines and engulfed the cockpit. A life winked out, like a glowstrip Luke hadn't noticed until he was left blind without it.

People thronged the Death Star; when he closed his eyes for just a blink he could almost hear them talk.

He couldn't do this.

"Three TIEs behind," Wedge said. "One of them—is that _Vader_?"

The Imperial ships screamed up behind them, a TIE bulkier than the others and of a type Luke's X-Wing's computer couldn't identify leading them. Lasers lashed out, and the two Rebels plunged down into the trench to escape. Red Leader was there already, sweeping on ahead of them through the manmade canyon.

And when Luke was trapped, Rebels before and Imperials behind and sheer walls at his sides, the Force folded around him like a smothering blanket. He could sense Darth Vader sinking into the dark side, reaching out to drag Luke down with him. Luke tried to bat Vader's presence away, but wasn't strong enough; he felt intent like words take up residence in a part of his mind that might as well have been prepared, wiped clean, for them. _Jedi. _

_No. _Luke could not speak out loud; the comm was open. But Vader heard.

_Join me, and find your true strength in the dark side. It is your destiny._ The words flowed through him, more a taste than a meaning.

Luke tried to shake the dark side off like water. Destiny…a bargaining chip. "Lord Vader. If it is me you want, spare the planet. Only then will I go with you, and halt our attack. _If _you agree to move the Death Star away."

"What?" Wedge blurted out.

Red Leader's voice quickly followed. "What're you talking about, Red Five?"

But Luke had chosen to speak out loud. "A Force user's worth a lot to him, and that's what I am." He could picture Red Leader looking down at the tac screen as they sped along, at the handful of Rebels remaining against waves of TIEs.

"Princess?" Red Leader commed Yavin. "Skywalker's suggesting we trade him for Yavin."

"Fine," Vader boomed. Luke drew himself up. If he could save the residents of Yavin and remaining pilots, even if that meant the Death Star remained functional (but what if he damaged it from the inside?) he would try. Would they ever be able to destroy it another way, with all the turrets and TIEs focused on them?

_You can_, Ben's voice presence out of the air, blue-tinted and redolent with the old Jedi's serenity. _Use the Force._

"Do what you will," Leia said, voice cracking. "Good luck."

Luke wondered what Susaa was thinking. He said, "I'll do it."

"Escort him to the main hanger," Vader intoned to his wingmen. All the ships rose almost gently together, Wedge and Red Leader to one side and Luke and the Imperials to the other. Ben's presence stood back and watched so quietly that Luke wasn't sure he wasn't imagining it.

His computer beeped; one of Vader's wingmen had locked onto him. To his left he saw the other peel off and fire at Red Leader.

The older man was caught by surprise. Wedge yelped uncontrollably as the X-Wing behind him cracked apart and fell onto the Death Star. "We had a deal, you—"

Luke's hands jumped to his triggers, but the TIE behind him just slid to the side, reminding him it was there and readier than him to fire. He seethed, lips twitching back from his teeth, as Wedge dwindled helplessly into the distance. In a few moments, Luke and his captors saw the blue glow of a force field set into the Death Star.


	16. Chapter 16

**XVI**

Leia, Susaa, and Dodonna looked at one another over their diagram of the Yavin system.

She spoke first. "Prepare to evacuate. They may still fire, but this gives us time."

"They've failed," Susaa breathed.

"Not yet," Dodonna said calmly, but he frowned down at the sweeping painted line of the Death Star's trajectory.

A tech behind a glass plate called out, "There's another ship headed in-system."

Leia whirled. "Who is it?"

"Princess, it's the _Millennium Falcon._"

**Luke stood in **front of Darth Vader on the immaculately polished surface of the Imperial hanger, watching an Imperial officer approach with six stormtroopers in tow.

"What have you brought me, Lord Vader?" The officer barked before he bothered to stop so military-sharply that his boot heels clicked. He looked down at Luke and his lined face seemed to gather in around a frown.

Luke felt Vader's hand grasp his shoulder, like a metal claw closing. "A Force-sensitive pilot. Interesting that the Rebellion was hiding him from us."

The officer sneered. "The Rebels are inconsequential now, or will be so in a matter of moments. What did you bring him here for?"

"To strike a deal." Vader moved out between Luke and the officer, and the young Jedi could sense animosity between them; could see it in the officer's eyes. Vader continued, "He has struck a bargain; himself for Yavin. I must take him to the emperor—the Force orders it."

Luke felt cold. Vader turned to march off, gesturing for the stormtroopers to flank Luke and follow him.

But the officer matched Vader stride for stride as best he could. "One person for a planet? An army? Lord Vader, our plan will not be compromised now."

Vader rounded on him. Luke tested the way his stormtrooper guards moved as he shifted, waiting for the right moment to escape. He just needed to buy Leia and the others time. ..

"Governor Tarkin," Vader boomed. "You know better than to question the will of the Force."

To his credit, Tarkin stood confident and flinty beneath Vader's onyx stare. "I cannot tell what is the will of the Force and what is your will alone, Lord Vader. Our command was to destroy the planet."

"The worth of a planet is insignificant next to the will of the Force."

_That's untrue, _Luke thought. _Otherwise I wouldn't be here. _

Tarkin composed himself, straightened his collar. "Then we will finish the world, if it matters little to you; it does matter to the emperor."

Vader's hand rose, and the Force made him appear even bulkier and darker than he truly was as it reached out and invisibly caught Tarkin by the throat. "Your insolence surprises me, governor…"

A metallically filtered voice echoed through the hanger. "We are clear to fire."

"Power down," Vader rumbled. The comm channel closed with a crackle.

Tarkin staggered, worked his mouth. Vader released the Force-hold and just looked at him, calm like a statue of a god on a mountain.

Tarkin swept a hand toward Vader and spoke to the stormtroopers. "Stun him, now--for assaulting a superior."

_An interesting man_, Luke thought; _not one to fight physically, but he knows how to intimidate, even when he's likely on the losing side. He wouldn't need to fight many beings for them to respect him, not with that poise._ But all these thoughts passed in a wordless flash. Stormtroopers raised their blasters, but hesitated to fire upon Vader. The Sith Lord reached out and toppled two of them. Others began to spread out and shoot, knees bent, the Force loud with their fear.

_Better to be imprisoned by one Imperial than a crowd. _Luke took his opportunity and spun. His high kick slammed the helmet of the stormtrooper behind him into the man's chin with a rattling thud, and the trooper fell backward as another, identical, turned. Luke could barely keep from fighting now, barely keep from turning the chaos in the Force, Vader's anger and his own worry into something simple and strong. While he looked out beyond the fallen man at the blue-sheen spacescape he flung a hand out behind him to Force-push and heard the clattering of armor. The movements seemed to open up his senses. He could feel Han and Chewbacca, coming this way on the wings of the _Falcon_. And Vader—

Luke turned to look at him, left alone in the eye of the storm with him while the Dark Lord reflected the troopers' blasterbolts back at them with his hands. Luke's eyes widened; he'd never seen such a power. Tarkin slowly walked backward as his troopers fell to the ground around him. Vader almost seemed to be protecting Luke, standing between him and the other Imperials. What fueled him now?

**The outrigger cockpit **of the _Millennium Falcon,_ hemmed in by the lights of the controls instead of open like the command deck of the _Rogue's Fate_, was filled with warm engine-sounds. It only reminded Han of how Luke was trapped in the cold corridors of the Death Star. He and Chewbacca had arrived back in the battle station's airspace after a one-sided argument in which Han had realized that, yelling at the Wookiee whose language he didn't understand, he might as well be yelling at himself, channeling all his guilt and feelings of uselessness. They couldn't leave their sometime companions to die.

And although Han barely admitted it, he had grown to care for Luke, Leia, Susaa and the others, to admire the audacity of their drive for galactic freedom.

And so Chewbacca dropped out of hyperspace and Han banked the _Falcon _around.

They had arrived just in time to catch Luke and his Imperial escort on the radar. Han had come in too close, and the_ Falcon _hurtled over the surface of the Death Star, turrets rotating to track him and lash out with their lasers. Only one X-Wing beside Luke's was visible, far away. The Rebels had failed.

Chewbacca growled and pointed. (Han would learn Shriiwook; he had resolved to.) Han urged the _Falcon _forward, and shot toward the Imperials.

Leia's voice came over the comm. "What are you doing, Solo?"  
"Rescuing your Jedi."

Just a moment's pause. "Hurry. We're evacuating the planet. Good luck."

Hurry he did. But Han's quarry floated in through the hanger's shield, and proximity klaxons began to go off around the cockpit. With baited breath Han circled, thinking frantically.

**Luke saw the **_Falcon _ soar by outside the blue sheen of shield. He delved into the Force, throwing his will out toward the mechanisms of the doorway. In the same way he'd built things in his youth without entirely knowing how to do it, he reached out now like a swimmer cupping rushing water in his hands as he sped along, and he _knew _how to drop the shields.

And Vader noticed. He lifted Tarkin into the air as the officer got to his feet, and tossed him limp across the room. Luke tore the shield down. Nothing changed visually, but the _Falcon's_ instruments must have picked up the change; it flipped toward the doorway.

Luke turned to face Vader. The Dark Lord moved like a krayt dragon, ponderous with restrained energy, footsteps echoing. The red lightsaber snapped to life in one black-wrapped glove. Luke's hand dropped to the hilts of his weapons, clipped to his flightsuit's harness. The _Falcon _ settled into the hanger, hydraulics pluming smoke out into the pristine atmosphere, their heat washing over Luke. Imperials in the command rooms overlooking the ships were surely in an uproar; more stormtroopers clattered into view.

Vader advanced, voice slow and inexorable as tectonic plates. "You will learn to accept the dark side."

Luke said, "The Rebels will escape. You have failed, Lord Vader."

"No, boy. Our battle is not fought out there, in starships. Jedi speak of peace, but murder what they call evil. Fighting that evil, you have already become it." Vader lunged forward, lightsaber sweeping for Luke's head. The young Jedi ducked and _knew _that Vader was going slow on him. Vader was deadly, but truly trying to turn, not kill him. _I must not let fear touch me---fear--_Luke stepped back and pinwheeled his sabers as they activated, green and blue growling together as he reached forward to nick at the armored chestplate. Vader batted one strike away and reached past another to slash through Luke's flightsuit's control box. The Jedi tripped back and reset his guard, grimacing.

The spirit of Obi-Wan said, _"Use the Force, Luke."_

He was about to ask what he was supposed to use it for when the world seemed to narrow, to slide backward around him like distortion through the lens of a camera. As if it was close-up he saw the struts above Vader, great white beams supporting the ceiling. He had pulled docking racks down before; this time—

He reached into the structure of the ceiling and snapped it. A beam forty feet long cracked like a splintered tree trunk and shook the hanger across its length, like bones shivering under skin. Above Vader, the ceiling opened up to dislodge spar-splinters, the freezing white fog of coolant, and smaller bars that the main one had supported. Sections of ceiling fell around Vader like spears.

But the Dark Lord was still coming, barreling forward as a black blur growing ever larger in Luke's sight, but in the Force sensations were aligning like an engine shifting into gear in Luke's mind, and he couldn't concentrate on both. Vader deflected falling spars with the Force, with a backhanded punch-block, with the pure momentum of one armored shoulder, and kept coming. On the edges of the wreckage stormtroopers moved like phantoms through the white fog, hurrying in droids and patches to fix the hole. Luke followed currents and conduits to the brightest source of power in the Death Star; the superlaser, a neat focal point of energy many floors (no floors at all) away. Vader's lightsaber lanced toward him, blood-crimson.

Luke chose to use the Force.

It coursed through the lines of electricity and movement that he could see so clearly and burst into the main reactor, whipped around it like a scythe, _knew _its weak points, took them apart.

Somewhere deep in the Death Star where Luke touched but could not see, the reactor core crumbled, deflated to collapse onto its own electric-burning heart.

And Luke held his lightsabers down by his sides and his head high as he concentrated, taken entirely by a power he did not yet control.

And Vader sliced through a falling cable that spit sparks against his black-shining carapace but did not touch any part of him that could hurt, and pulled his lightsaber back for a quick and easy strike, and stabbed for Luke's heart.


	17. Chapter 17

**XVII**

Darth Vader's lightsaber sunk in between Luke's chest and his arm. Vader pulled it out again straight, waiting with a mind blank with uncertainty to see whether the shot was fatal. He hadn't meant it to be, just a burn that would scar close enough to teach the whelp the line the dark side walked, the line every being walked between life and life-with-loss and how tiny and perforated the line was—

But with so many years of training he could easily tell that the blade had been turned aside just a millimeter. The young Jedi's armor was not lightsaber-resistant, but it had a thickness of its own that Vader had not counted on. He shuddered, let his left hand go limp so that the blue lightsaber clattered to the floor and winked out.

Over the comm came, "Emergency repair procedures activated for the core level. Warning, contaminant released. Contaminant released—"

That was not the only malfunction on the Death Star. One of the Rebel ships swooped in and landed in a skidding, scraping but somehow right-side-up mess, its top panels smoking where a communications dish had been torn off on the hanger's bay door. Stormtroopers fired intermittently at it when they could be spared from attempting to patch up the coolant leak behind Vader, but it didn't matter anyway—the bolts plashed blue against the ship's shields. Its landing ramp began to descend, showing a tall figure with a cocked firearm standing in the widening crack of visible interior.

The boy's eyes snapped open. He gasped, pale and chapped from the dry air and pain. The green lightsaber came up fast enough that Vader had to step to the side and block clumsily; the boy's next strike sent Vader's saber tip wildly off true. But instead of continuing an attack, the young Jedi turned and ran. Vader held out a hand to stop him, but a moment later his trajectory in the Force changed as he engaged his armor's jetpack and hurtled toward the Rebel ship a meter off the ground. The smoke and fire from the launch added to the miasma forming in the air as the stormtroopers failed to prevent the ceiling from continuing to rupture. Vader could barely think as the smuggler dropped to the Rebel ship's ramp and staggered once, only to have his arm grasped and held up by the Wookiee revealed by the hanger lights.

Vader almost kicked the discarded lightsaber with his next stride as he pounded toward the ship. But he wasn't going to get there in time; there was another person at the helm keeping the engines hot, and the ship kicked up on antigrav and streamed out the hanger's shield airlock. But Vader's TIE was still hooked in nearby and ready to go--

He climbed the ladder to it with the lightsaber clenched in one hand and his own back on his belt. It took a moment to engage the engines, but clearing security was simple for the TIE Advanced, and when Vader finally got out to black space the Rebels were still in visual range, far away and awash in the glow of their own sublights.

**Luke lay in** a bunk on the _Falcon _as Chewbacca peeled the armor away from his chest and arm. He felt wounded and mentally exhausted, but as the armor plates were discarded--charred and almost burnt through--Luke saw how the lightsaber had cut chunks out of both the bicep armor and that over his heart, but not actually touched his skin. It was the armor that had bruised him, while saving his life.

And he had disabled the Death Star without killing anyone.

He closed his eyes as Chewbacca lay a cool cloth sprayed with bacta over his throbbing side.

"You alright, kid?" Han said over the intercom.

"Yeah." Luke couldn't help but smile. "You came back."

"Well I…ah, wasn't going to leave you and the princess. Who knows what trouble you could've gotten into."

Luke laughed. "I'll remember what lengths you're willing to go to. The Rebellion should be safe for now; the Death Star laser is useless."

"We're meeting up with the others now," Han said. "They're heading out of the system."

"We don't have to. The Imperials will leave."

Han wasn't saying the _Are you sure?_ that tainted his tone. "Let's see where things go from here."

**Vader accelerated. The **young Jedi could not be taken alive, not now, but it barely mattered; Vader was angry with a vengefulness that said he _must _ be able to salvage some victory from this disaster. Darth Sidious would not be pleased.

The Death Star hailed him and he clicked the comm without taking his gaze off the distant ship. "What is it, trooper?"

"The reactor core is overheating, sir. We'll have to evacuate and abandon the mission—the superlaser is destroyed, and—" the comm crackled. He heard "Unstable."

And the Force cried out. _Now _Vader craned his head around, but he sensed it before he saw it come clawing out of the Death Star's innards, the radioactive fluid from the reactor eating away at what it touched, setting off miniature explosions all along the spokes of the battle station. Vader felt something he had not in many years—awe at the power of the Force, which he professed but so rarely got to use to its full extent, to all the effects of its existence—as the Death Star cracked in two, venting atmosphere and fire. He felt lives like stars go out leaving heavy grey matter sinking into nothingness.

Just another thing that was built without the Force and died without it.

But Sidious would not be pleased…

**Luke thrashed. The** waves of fire sweeping through the Death Star hit him like nothing he had ever felt before, something physical and more, like an electric shock. So _this _was what Kenobi had felt when Alderaan died, _this _was why he had bent over as if years had been added to his bones. Chewbacca leaned on Luke's shoulder, a weight as sudden as a flung boulder, and growled in Shrywook something that Luke didn't have to think about in order to know it meant _don't move, you'll ruin the poultice._

But Luke croaked out words. "It's gone. I saved it, I made that decision, and it killed itself—"

Had he done this? Had he, without any thought in his mind of this eventuality, done it? Destroyed the Death Star after going through so much and getting his side hurt just for the same result to happen? No. It wouldn't…be like that. He was light side. He cast about for reassurance in the Force and found none. It gave nothing, only monitored, like the screen on the X-Wing (gone, now), on which he had seen his friends' lives wink away—

He had had nothing against the workers on the Death Star, had been ready to hate the sin and not the sinner.

And…

His breath caught and wracked, but, unlike all those countable _oh so countable like cards in his hand _people, he was alive.

**Vader took the **TIE out on a trajectory aimed to get him into hyperspace as quickly as possible. The Rebels might come after him; either way, Sidious would need this report in person. Let the survivors of the Death Star fall on Rebel mercy.

The coordinates were set; Vader reached down for the TIE's customized hyperspace trigger and pulled, blurring the stars. And he looked down to see the lightsaber he had picked up, rolling about on the floor. He scooped it up, looked at the thick hilt, the emitter of the blue blade.

This looked _familiar_. It reeked of an old life; of the same hand that held it now, waving it aloft as a young man in half-clone armor half-dark Jedi robes commanded his troops—Rex, Ahsoka—in another war—

Vader could not bring himself to crush Anakin Skywalker's lightsaber, but he felt the _want _in his iron bones.

Obi-Wan Kenobi had held this last, on the world Mustafar. The young Jedi must have come into contact with him—befriended him—he could not have stolen it, not from Kenobi. It was strange that a near-adult Force user existed at all in a galaxy of Inquisitors. The Outer Rim was backwater, but it was still Imperial territory, and familiar and compliant with their laws. Kenobi had rooted the boy out…

Or known where he was all the time, ever since Mustafar.

The children.

Vader could not bring himself to say _my son_, not even to think it. That was for later, after he told Sidious (because Sidious would know); this was just a piece of information. Kenobi had resurfaced and been killed and left Anakin's saber to his son—to Luke Skywalker.

This information would temper Sidious' rage.


	18. Chapter 18

**XVIII**

The _Falcon_ looped around Yavin IV as Han waited for the Rebels to make their decision. Leia was surely doing the same in the evacuation ship, waiting tensely for the Imps to make a move. With trepidation paling his hands on the control yoke Han watched burning pieces of the Death Star detach from its innards and extinguish. How had Luke, the man lying wounded somewhere behind him, done this? Han's radar picked up the Death Star beginning to move, its drives a white splash leaking light barely visible behind the continued crumpling of its superstructure, just before Leia commed in.

"They're limping away."

Escape pods and starcruisers blasted from the failing hunk and sped for hyperspace; hundreds of them, until the last skimmed out on the edge of a sonic wave as the Death Star's core reactor finally blew. Han didn't understand why the explosion looked so dim and far away, so unexciting after everything that had happened, until the _Falcon_'s protective visual dampener flicked off and he saw the almost-blinding remains, a semicircular skeleton drifting toward the gravity well of the gas giant Yavin.

"I can't believe it," Leia breathed. "They're leaving Yavin to us."

"Couldn't they still attack with TIEs?" Han asked.

"Not without leaving the Death Star open to you."

"To me? What am I going to do?"

"They don't know. Now, circle around and meet up with us. They'll be back with more ships eventually. But now…I think we've won."

**The doors onto **the ziggurat's audience chamber rumbled open, and Luke stepped through to the sudden wash of applause. Elation glowed from the gathered crowd in the Force just as it had from Leia when he and Han had docked again at the Temple and she had leapt into his arms as everyone seemed determine to hug Luke, Han and Chewbacca, or just pat their arms as if the victory would rub off. C-3P0 rushed to assist as R2-D2 was lifted down from his sconce in the X-Wing. Now, Rebels from across the galaxy had braved discovery to pay homage to the beings who had destroyed the Death Star and dealt the Empire a crippling blow, sending them the message that the Rebels were not a few factions, but an army in its own right.

Ranked according to their work—pilots in orange, ground crew and soldiers in blue—they all turned to see the four heroes walk along the aisle to the dais where Princess Leia, along with Susaa and her generals, stood, her dark hair framed by a halo of white feathers to match her sparkling sheath dress. She seemed to be beaming her benevolent smile right at Luke, although surely Han, standing at his side dressed in an orange flightsuit befitting his status as the _Millennium Falcon_'s pilot and owner, and Chewbacca, felt the same way.

Luke could not help but think, though, that after this he would sit down and never want to stand again, because he had _felt_ how many people had not escaped the Death Star.

But Leia smiled softly at him as he reached his place on the dais and stood, the hero they wanted, as she placed a medal about his neck.

**_Don't worry_, **he had told them as the _Rogue's Fate _lifted off from Yavin IV. "I'll be back. I just have to go see some old friends first."

And it was true; he would go back. He had considered lying, but that would be selfish more than anything else. It would set aside everything that Leia, as well as Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker, and all the Jedi with them, had fought for. Luke would go back, although there was blood on his hands. He just needed to go home first.

He could always find Muurkal, no matter how much her ship moved around; she would always be there on the other end of the comm. So when they rendezvoused, the _Fate_ attaching to her ship as if it had never left its accustomed port, Muurkal was waiting—along with everyone else.

Luke swept his adopted mother into his closest approximation of a Trianii hug and received a suffocating, furry real one in return, before the dozens of other crewmembers-family broke any semblance of an orderly line to welcome him and Susaa back.

He told his story a dozen times, recounting his adventures with the Death Star—skimming over his reluctance to destroy it. Would they understand the Force, here? They had never been able to make him understand it, not like Kenobi had.

But they talked and ate and remembered. Although it seemed that a lifetime must have passed while he was away and everything changed, he knew exactly how to get around.

And finally, he asked if he could speak to Muurkal alone, and she lead him to a sitting room on the edge of her private quarters, a place furnished with hangings and pillows so that it hardly looked like a room on a spaceship. She took a seat on the couch, and Luke on a low tussock, and he lay his forearms on his knees and did not know what to say to her. She waited with one furry arm over the back of the couch, slightly smiling, giving no indication that it bothered her to wait, or that she thought he had anything less than crucial to say.

Finally she said, "His name was Obi-Wan Kenobi, the man who left you with me, and he came with Master Yoda, the leader of the Jedi Order."

"Ben Kenobi."

Her ears tilted back as her head tipped forward. "Yes. You met him?"

"He was living on Tatooine. He…helped me."

"I know that Jedi don't have families. You aren't the first Force-sensitive kid I'd raised." She smiled with upturned lips. "But he looked at you like a father."

Luke could imagine that, easily. Obi-Wan's spirit had been so warm. "But I was his apprentice's."

"Yes; Anakin Skywalker. They were famous in the Clone Wars; Kenobi and Skywalker, the heroes who could never die. Of course…" Her hands shrugged, showing the thick dark pads.

_And now he's left me alone_, Luke thought, but he could not mean it grudgingly. "What about the other Force-sensitive you raised? Are they still alive?"

Muurkal laughed like a human. "Do you see this gray fur? It's not just from raising you. I'm old, Luke, the same as for one of my species as for one of yours. The first Jedi child I raised would have been adult when you were born, and was a child when I was too young to know it was a better idea to turn her in to the Temple."

"What happened to her?"

"She turned out fine. Was a Knight working on medical stations and caught some disease they couldn't cure, just before the Clone Wars. But before that, she nearly destroyed my ship with accidental power."

"I'm sorry."

"Be sorry only for her death."

"No, I…" His thoughts seemed to be flowing faster than his words, and he had to let them out as best as possible. "You heard that the Death Star was destroyed."

"Of course."

"I didn't want to do it! I—There were innocent people aboard!"

Muurkal grew quiet. "I thought of you, doing that. I didn't think you would."

"But I did. By _mistake._" It was disgusting, how such a thing was even possible. He passed his hands over his head and stalled them there. "I don't want to use the Force again."

He couldn't see her expression, but she sounded surprised and concerned. "But it's a part of you."

"It led me into this mess."

"Into the Rebellion? Into helping Obi-Wan? You don't regret that."

He looked up. "No. But do you think I shouldn't regret all those deaths?" He stood up.

Muurkal remained on the couch. "I never said that. Decisions are not easy—"

"This is the least-easy decision I've ever heard of."

No reply. Luke paused with his hand on the doorjam. "Yoda, the other one that was with him. Is he alive?"

"I don't know. He was an alien, an impish one."

"Maybe I'll try to find him."

"Are you going back to the Rebellion?"

"Yes."

"You're always welcome back…my son."

He paused, looked back at her…then went out and shut the door. He was enveloped in brothers and sisters again, but one stood out—Susaa, standing with his furry arms crossed near the hatch to the _Rogue's Fate._

Luke took him aside. It was easy to see that something was wrong. "Susaa?"

"Luke." He kept his arms crossed. "I'm not going back to the Rebellion."

"Wait…"

"I've thought a lot about it; don't talk me down now. I admire what you do. But I wasn't helpful there—and I can be here. We're here if you need to. But…I'm a business-Kentra."

He was tired of disappointment, and so Luke segued into anger. "Fine. Go."

"Don't be angry, please. Whatever help you need—"

"I'll call. I mean it. I'll call even when I don't need help, just to see how you're doing. But I'll miss you."

"And I'll miss you."

And because he believed him, it was easier for Luke to walk away.

Susaa said, "Wait."

Luke looked back. 'What?"

"Here." Susaa held up his hand. "I took this from your room today. I've taken it before, when I was young, trying to get it to work. But this time I took it to give it back. Thought you might have forgotten."

It was the holocron. Luke said, "I did." He stared at the square of light metal, thinking of Obi-Wan's form within. A little preserved bit of the man Luke had known in flesh and blood, as well as a person he had known only as the hologram, and who had been a mentor even then. "Thank you."

They clasped hands.

**Han Solo ** was staring at his own Wanted poster on the cantina door. It was an Imperial edict. Luckily they hadn't figured out that he was using the _Millennium Falcon_. He pulled his brimmed hat lower over his face, and muttered to Chewbacca, "Let's go."

They trudged up the packed-sand road to the Whitesuns'. Talia and Mark opened the door together, huddled together as if afraid their foster son would come home in a pressurized cylinder. When they saw him, their watery blue eyes widened.

"Han!—" Talia's thick arms were around Han's neck before he knew what was happening, and he hugged her back with a firmness that surprised even himself. She passed him into Mark's embrace. The moisture farmer, a faded tattoo from his regiment days just showing in stripes at his graying hairline, moved forward to shut the door and force Han and Chewie inside. Talia sniffled. "After the Lars homestead…we thought you'd been killed."

"No, no." Han almost laughed. If it wasn't safe to tell them it wasn't safe for anyone. "I've been—"

"No." Mark's stare bored into him. "Stormtroopers have been talking to us, asking questions. I want to truthfully not be able to answer them. I suspect where you've been, and I think you'll always make right decisions. But don't foist that on us."

"Come, have something to eat."

Talia cooked, moving in and out of the dining room, touching Han on the shoulder or catching her fingers in his hair every time, as if to make sure he was still there. He introduced Chewbacca; his adopted father made small talk. Little had changed in his concerns as they had in Han's; he spoke of water volumes, of Sand People, of swoop races. And Han thought for a moment of his girlfriend Leeta, wondered where she was and what she had thought of his disappearance. He tried to tell his father what had happened to him without really telling, tried to explain about loyalty and friendship and fear. And his father told him more than he ever had before about his days in a small planetary army that had seen a bloody war.

The next time Talia emerged from the kitchen she smiled softly. "I called someone."

Han looked up at her quizzically. There came a knock at the door, and his family told him to opened it and forestalled Chewbaccca when he stood up to go too.

So Han should not have been surprised, but he was when he saw Leeta at the door, her salmon-colored skin clear and healthy, her smile blending neatly, painfully into worry at her eyes.

She too threw her arms around his neck, and he fell full-heartedly into the embrace, his hands slipping beneath her lekku like he remembered. "I've missed you so much," she murmured. "Your face…" Almost-sharp nails stroked his cheek on familiar lines. "I thought something would be different."

"I know," he whispered, holding her tight. "I know," and he meant it, because she was both strange and familiar at the same time.

"Where have you been?" Standing in the doorway not minding how the automated sliding door wanted to close, buzzing at them, she laid her forehead against his. "Why didn't you call?"

"It was too dangerous. Leeta, I…I don't think I should tell you. If you get in trouble because of me…"

She pulled away and her expression was mixed, but she remained close to him as he took her hand and lead her inside.

The five of them had dinner together, and at the end he did not want to leave. Why should he, when it had taken so long to arrive? So very long. They talked of people they had known and of weather that changed with the seasons. Mark glanced nervously at the door sometimes, and Han remembered the weak-chinned, gray-haired old man having the same expression before he stood up and scooped up his rifle to scare Tuskens off the lawn. Evening fell.

When he came back from putting dishes away, Leeta pulled him over to the door. She stared into his eyes and said, "I want to go with you."

He stared back, more confused than determined. "You want to…you know I…" She deserved to know. "You want to join the Rebellion."

Her eyes widened and her voice lowered; so she hadn't known. "I…want to go with you. I've missed you."

"It's dangerous. They need _soldiers._"

"Han! I've been working as a mechanic; they'll need that! And I can learn.. I can, ah, carry boxes around."

And he realized he had been wanting her to convince him. He hadn't thought of her much in his travels but now her presence flooded him so completely he thought it might be something like the Force felt like. He composed himself. "Come along. I'm sure Princess Leia will find a place for you."

Leeta raised an eyebrow. "Princess?"

Was Leeta the jealous type? Han didn't know. "One of the leaders."

Leeta gave a tight smile. "No more adventuring without me."

**The Whitesuns wanted **him to stay, but Han and Mark had begun to look over their shoulders every other breath. They loaded Leeta's bike onto the _Millennium Falcon_, and Han stood with his dusty brown cloak over his head, all of them watching the entrance to the docking bay in fits and starts. Leeta and Chewbacca headed up the ramp with supplies the Whitesuns had gifted them.

Talia hugged Han, squeezing her eyes tightly shut. "We'll watch the news for you. Come home when you can. Give Leeta your love."

Mark clasped his hand, stony. Quiet and close he said, "I'll tear down your wanted poster."

Mark felt his wife grasp his hand to comfort both of them as they moved beneath the shadow of the docking bay's protecting wall. They watched the _Falcon _kick off and soar away, leaving tiny puffs of smoke in its faintly glowing wake.

**Leia felt so **alive. People bustled around her in the command center, each with a task she could settle her attention on if she desired or they needed. Outside the wide window the jungle of Yavin IV rippled in the wind. Most of the trees were lower than the ziggurat, and so she could see the jungle as a balcony of green tinged with the orange light of the setting planet.

Fallout from the Death Star had not killed the jungle, and the Empire had not killed the Rebellion.

She smiled, quietly content.

A man at the radar station called her name and she moved to his side. He said, "Two ships incoming."

The screen showed rudimentary , flat silhouettes and the name of the vessels. Leia's smile widened. "It's Luke and Han," she said. "Welcome them in."

She watched two silver stars streak across the sky. The sons of the suns were coming home.

_End of part I._

_To be continued…_


	19. Part 2 Vignette 1: GetAway

_Welcome to Part 2. Subsequent chapters will not be linear and in novel-format like the story has been thus far; I'm sorry to say that it simply hasn't been holding my attention. But SotS will be continued, by both myself and other guest-writers (if you want to be one, send me a PM), writing snippets within the same universe, and, hopefully, completing the picture of what happens during the next two movies._

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**Get-Away**

_Written by wordswithout, who despite being an avowed hater of Star Wars, wrote this (mostly) of her own volition after beta-reading the last chapter of SotS and discussing where I wanted to go with the Han/Leia or Han/Leeta. There may or may not be a shadowy deal involved. This takes place somewhere around episode 5.

* * *

  
_

Leeta stood with her arms folded, back against the wall, watching Han with her yellow eyes burning lightsaber-strong holes into his back as he moved around the cramped storage room. Boxes of outdated datapads cluttered the room; Leeta kept her gaze on Han as he stumbled over them and cursed to himself. She frowned. Even the swear word was strange—some oath to some other world's deity. The busy, fulfilled glow he wore these days was still so foreign to her (how could he be so satisfied, so far from home?) and now not even his words were the same…

There was nothing about this man she knew.

Han bent over, peering inside a large crate filled to the brim with odds and ends. "The princess said the generator coils would be in here…"

Leeta twitched her lekku in annoyance—she always did when _the almighty perfect kriffing princess_ was mentioned. "The head of the entire rebellion is worrying about generator coils? Doesn't she have other things to do with her time?"

"You know her worshipfulness." Han smirked, but in a distinctly non-nasty way. "Has to be involved with everything." He kicked another box out of his way, looked back at her. "Hey, did you want something? You've been standing there watching me make a mess of the cargo hold for a while now."

Leeta weighed her options. "I haven't seen much of you," she said carefully. She didn't usually like hesitating over her speech—she said what she thought, end story. But with Han… "Why don't we take the _Millennium Falcon _out and…"

But Han was frowning. She trailed off.

"Now? Here? There's rules on who can fly out when, and—"

"And you follow them?" Leeta spat at him. Fury, and something far darker, raged in the pit of her stomach. "What a well-behaved little boy you've become."

Han kicked another box out of his way. "I see their point, that's all," he said lightly. "If I wanted to I'd take off right now."

"But you don't want to. Take off, I mean." She folded her arms. "With me."

She expected Han to at least have the dignity to look embarrassed, or regretful. Maybe annoyed. She didn't expect him to roll her eyes.

"Do I mean anything to you?" she hissed.

"Leeta. I know I've been distracted lately, but it's not for no reason. We're in the middle of a _war."_

"I don't _care_. It has nothing to do with us."

"It has everything to do with us! We're both here to win it!"

"No, _you're_ here to…" Leeta felt her voice become strangled. She stopped talking and watched Han scowl. "Han, I'm sorry. I'm not trying to fight. I just…miss you. I came here to be with you but I feel like the last time you _were_ you was back on Tatooine!"

"What are you talking about? How am I anything but—I mean, sure, I've changed. What were you _expecting_?"

Leeta didn't know how to answer. What was she expecting? To be sent from one side of the fleet to another by irritated superiors who didn't know what to do with her? To be told by some foul-mouthed mechanic, a _Dug_ of all creatures, that her skills were five years out of date? To sit aimlessly in the mess hall as Han gushed with everyone else about battles and strategy and _down with the Empire, the rebellion will succeed! _She heard people rant about the Emperor and the alliances and the importance of it all, and all she could ever think was _why_?

Had she expected this to be some exciting, romantic get-away? Was she jealous of the war for the attention it took from Han? Was she the only one who remembered their racing over rust-colored hills, screaming with the joy of the world around them as they streaked across sandy skies, feeling the heat baking into their skin and making them _whole_…?

"Han," she said quietly. "I want to go home."

But he hadn't heard her. He'd already turned back to the boxes, shuffling through the mess in search of the princess's coil.


End file.
